Effectiveness of IT Security Tools in Practice

In today’s world, IT security plays a critical role in different organizations, yet little is known about IT security in the context of organizations. This paper addresses this issue based on qualitative description analysis of 10 interviews with IT security practitioners from small to medium size organizations. Our results revealed the required knowledge and skills for effective IT security, IT security tasks, and the tools which are used to perform these tasks. Based on these results, we realized that current IT security tools can be improved in order to provide more effective support for security practitioners’ activities. Founded on our analysis, we proposed some guidelines, such as regular update, settings for alerts, integrity of data, and effective logging of forensics information, in order to improve IT security tools.