For many businesses, justifying a budget for IT security remains a perennial challenge.

As part of McAfee's participation in E-security Awareness Week, I've spent the last three days talking directly to customers at an Executive Summit we hosted in the Hunter Valley in New South Wales, and gleaned some of the challenges organisations are currently facing.

In the context of what challenges face CxO's and security managers when it comes to better securing corporate networks and managing risk, there is a definite sense of this being a "work in progress". Their call was to make the proposition simpler while providing higher levels of protection and compliance.

These stakeholders understand the evolving complexity and escalation of threats to their organisations and their data.  On the one hand they are witnessing a proliferation of "smart" devices, many of which are being carried into the office and connected up to the corporate network without being properly checked for malware or not having the disk encrypted in the event of the device being lost.