Survey for Cloud Computing and Insider Threats

¶ … Cloud Computing and Insider Threats)

A survey will be conducted of 40 businesses that have successfully dealt with insider threats. These 40 businesses will be compared with another online survey that arbitrarily and randomly samples other businesses.

My objectives will be to assess how 40 large companies successfully deal with insider threats and how these practices contrast with practices from other companies.

My methodology will be the following: I will randomly select 40 companies from the top Fortune 500 companies and, approaching their manager, will ask the manager whether I can conduct a survey on computer security on their company and whether I can distribute this survey to officials form their IT division. The survey will have certain key items, some of which will be graded on a Likert scale from 0 to 5. One of the questions may, for instance, be "How secure do you think your company's computer is from the following:

the spread of computer viruses infiltration and theft of data from external hackers engineered network overloads triggered by malicious mass e-mailing electronic surveillance of corporate computer data by outside parties damage from malfunction, fire, or natural disasters (Computer Security)

The questions will be a combination of short, quantitative questions (yes or no, rate this from 1 to 5, etc.) as well as qualitative questions (where respondent will be asked to elaborate on response), and multi-choice questions as in the example above.

I will ensure that questions will be clear, succinct, and easily understood. I will have a group of assistants who will review the questions beforehand to ensure that questions are open-ended and not directive and that they preclude bias and are sensitive. This will prevent response bias. In order to deter fatigue and improve clarity, I will also place easier questions first, avoid words that provoke bias or emotional responses, use a logical order and place similar questions together (The Community Tool Box). I will use the questions produced by Power (1999) in his survey as my base modifying them to suit my particular population.

The survey will be accompanied by a SAE and recipients will be asked to complete and mail the survey within the month. Researcher and/or assistants will contact a tardy recipient to query reason for lateness.

The survey results of these 40 companies will then be analyzed to see whether they possess any common themes. The respondents too will be consulted if the researcher has any difficulty in understanding (or may possibly misinterpret) one of the responses.

As comparison to these 40 companies, an alternate survey will be held online of arbitrary companies who choose to enter. The questions will be the same as those drafted for the 40 companies. They will be in the same format, and the same style. Online companies will be asked to describe their demographics (e.g. size, location, profession and so forth). An incentive will be offered for companies to respond. I will use the e-Rewards and MySurvey sites where respondents either earn money or points for each survey they fill out and submit. Those points can be redeemed for rewards such as discounts on products, free airline miles or gasoline gift cards (How Online Surveys Work).

The responses of these online companies too will be searched for common themes, and contrast will be conducted between the two groups. This will be done via a t-test (or a ANOVA if there are various conditions), and statistical effects too will be used in order to assess whether differences -- if there are any -- are significant and are caused by significant factor. In both cases, both descriptive and inferential analysis will be run on the data. The descriptive analysis will fully delineate the details of the both offline and online companies that have been surveyed. The inferential statistics, on the other hand, will use ANOVA / t-test and correlational statistics (such as Chi-square) to assess whether any association can be traced between measures that they take and the safety of their systems.

The online survey, too, will last for the duration of a month until results are collated.