bMighty Q&A: Leaders Talk IT For Your Business

Businesses face security threats from every direction, but IT managers in small and midsize businesses have less than an hour each week to manage security. McAfee's midmarket senior VP discusses meeting this resource challenge and the five areas that spawn 80% of security problems.

In recent years, incessant security threats have grown more varied with no sign of diminishing. Yet despite the obvious risks, IT departments in many small and midsize businesses remain so overburdened that managing security is often viewed as an additional responsibility. To help these overloaded IT staff, McAfee offers a 15 minute per day solution dubbed Total Protection for Secure Business (ToPs) that seeks to help small IT staffs gain the upper hand in managing security.

Recently, bMighty spoke with Darrell Rodenbaugh, McAfee's senior VP for the worldwide midmarket segment, about ToPs and the similarities between the security challenges smaller companies and large enterprises face and the huge disparity in the resources they wield to combat them.

bMighty: How do small and midsize business security concerns differ from those of large enterprises?

Darrell Rodenbaugh: They swim in the same Internet cesspool. They're exposed to the same risks. Their end users make the same mistakes. They're going to the same wrong places on the Web; 95% of their e-mail is spam and 25% of that carries some malicious intent. They have the same data exposure; a data breach is every bit as devastating for a small business as for a larger corporation. Fundamentally, all businesses of all sizes have the same risk profile. The challenge is that small and midsize businesses don't have the same resource profile.

Don't Miss: The Complete Q&A with Darrell Rodenbaugh