According to the survey of more than 100 information security professionals, 66% of respondents cited human error in the configuration of network security devices as the most common cause of outages in the past 12 months, followed by capacity overload (14%) and flaws in the gateway product (9%).
The majority of respondents said they had from 10 to 49 different security gateways installed on their network. Another 15% of companies had more than 50 security gateways installed.
The most common security gateways were firewalls, installed on 98% of corporate networks, along with anti-virus (90%) and content filters (85%).
Among these devices, respondents said that firewalls required the greatest investment of time and were held responsible for causing the most network disruptions. A full 73% of respondents cited a "high number of changes" as the primary reason for the large time investment in managing security gateways.
"The survey suggests that organizations may actually over-invest in extra capacity in fear of network outages, rather than address security management issues that can have the same impact," said Nimmy Reichenberg, AlgoSec's vice president of marketing.
"The only constant in network security management is that configurations are constantly changing. But often the most dangerous device on the network is the keyboard -- where configuration errors are made. We need to take this responsibility out of the hands of administrators. Automation is critical to maintaining proper security and operations”, concluded Avishai Wool, chief technology officer at AlgoSec.