Abstract
The purpose of this paper was to identify ICT security measures and to assess the level of ICT security in small, medium and large enterprises in spatial terms. The measures in the ICT security area were identified based on secondary data of European Union member states retrieved from the Eurostat database. The research used the CCR Date Envelopment Analysis (CCR-DEA) model to meet the research purpose.The research identifies countries where ICT security results were achieved with the optimum combination of expenditures, i.e. the so-called fully efficient countries. The authors demonstrate that the countries participating in the optimal shared technology are aligned to non-fully efficient countries and they can achieve their results at lower expenditures. In the optimal technologies of all non-fully efficient countries the volume of the achieved results of enterprises is slightly higher than the actual volume. Research conducted in the area of enterprise ICT security rarely focuses on the efficiency of actions undertaken. The authors of this paper examine the technical efficiency in the area of enterprise information security in spatial terms and formulate conclusions about enterprises in the EU member states. The application of the expenditure-oriented CCR-DEA model identifies countries that achieve their results fully utilising their expenditures and those that are able to achieve at least the same results as achieved by non-fully efficient countries but at lower expenditures. The technical efficiency analysis of actions undertaken represents the starting point for defining good practices and success factors in the area of ICT security, both at enterprise and country levels.
Highlights
Modern-day organisations are operating in the age of continuous real-time exchange of information
The "Enterprises did not experience any problem due to Information and communication technologies (ICTs) security incidents: unavailability of ICT services" (OUT_unavailability) variable shows the share of enterprises which use computers and which in 2019 did not report any unavailability of ICT services due to overloads, failures and human errors occurring during introduction of updates
The "Enterprises using any ICT security measure (IN_measure)" variable shows the share of enterprises which use computers and which in 2019 used any ICT security measure, in particular: keeping the software up-to-date; user identification and authentication via biometric methods implemented by the enterprise; encryption techniques for data, documents or e-mails; data backup to a separate location; network access control; VPN (Virtual Private Network extends a private network across a public network to enable secure exchange of data over public network); maintaining log files for analysis after security incidents; ICT risk assessment, i.e. periodically assessment of probability and consequences of ICT security incidents; ICT security tests
Summary
Modern-day organisations are operating in the age of continuous real-time exchange of information. As information is the foundation of the decision-making process, effective competition requires organisations to have access to information and to be able to disseminate information among their stakeholders (Naicker et al, 2019). For this reason, it is necessary to ensure information security so that information can be used for making key business decisions. Security-related tasks can be very complex (Sönmez, 2019) For this reason, the literature on the subject includes models, which support the enterprise management process in terms of information security by raising awareness on security factors, which need to be taken into account in the decisionmaking process (Diesch et al, 2020). Information security research focuses on information security data exchange, threat intelligence sharing or information security data sources, like vulnerability databases (Sauerwein et al, 2019)
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