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Security policies for small and medium enterprises
Kanellos A, Dimopoulos V, Clarke NL
Advances in Network & Communication Engineering 3, pp20-29, 2006
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Over the last few years, the advances in information technology have brought many changes to the business environment. More and more businesses now try to take advantage of the technologies and applications that promise to help them improve many of their tasks. Companies of whatever the size are now becoming increasingly reliant on the Internet to fulfill many of their basic functions and ultimately to remain competitive in the demanding marketplace. Many of them are now conducting transactions over the Internet using email and other applications to make some of their tasks more efficiently and to improve their relationship with their customers. But as they increase the level of their connectivity to the Internet and the applications surrounded by the web, they increase the potential of a malicious security breach that could harm the business continuity and that could result ultimately in significant losses. Hence some sort of protection measures are now considered necessary for businesses of any size with the security policies regarded as the first and most important of them. Controversially to that aspect small and medium enterprises are found through major surveys like the DTI and the CSI/FBI security surveys to lack sufficient protection since the majority of them reported not to adopt or having difficulties to adopt security policy practices. In general, the findings from various surveys are quite discouraging for the small and medium firms as far as security protection is concerned. Because of this situation some sort of solution was investigated and provided by this paper by taking into consideration the factors that minimise the adoption of security policies in the SMEs. In addition, the solution described takes into account the potential of using baseline guideline documents.

Kanellos A, Dimopoulos V, Clarke NL