The list of information security threats facing organizations continues to grow longer. But it's up to CIOs to put the right defenses - and priorities - in place, says David White at BAE Systems Applied Intelligence.

Wary of intrusions, data compromise and theft, organizations increasingly are deploying privileged access management solutions. Idan Shoham of Hitachi ID Systems offers the essential do's and don'ts.

Keeping track of missing devices is a critical aspect of information security. Ali Solehdin, senior product manager at Absolute Software, discusses Computrace, which helps organizations secure endpoints and the sensitive data those devices contain.

EdgeWave's Mike Walls, a former bomber pilot who led Navy red teams, says penetration testing is useful in analyzing bits and bytes but not the readiness of operations under attack from cyberspace. Red teams, he says, can analyze the impact on operations.

Organizations are getting increasingly prioritizing incident response capabilities by putting investigation firms on retainer, or creating their own internal teams, says Patrick Morley, president and CEO of Bit9 + Carbon Black.

Gartner's Claudio Neiva says there is only so much an intrusion detection and prevention system can do, so organizations need to take additional steps to safeguard critical data and systems.

Attackers today continue to refine their distributed denial-of-service attack capabilities, delivering downtime on demand. The increase in attack effectiveness and volume demands new types of defenses, says Akamai's Richard Meeus.

Two years after the leaks that showed the U.S. National Security Agency spied on America's European allies, the U.S. and Europe still need to rebuild trust so they can collaborate on defending against cyber-attacks, says Carsten Casper of Gartner.

Last year, organizations took an average of 205 days to detect a breach. To better combat such attacks and lock down breaches, FireEye's Jason Steer says organizations must lower that to hours or even minutes.

Larry Ponemon, founder of the Ponemon Institute, offers an in-depth analysis of the results of the organization's 10th study of the costs of data breaches, which found, for example, that rapid growth in hacker attacks is leading to escalating costs.