A recent survey of IT professionals shows that while enterprises seek to leverage compliance-driven security expenditures for general security and risk management tasks, they find it difficult to accomplish this with their existing solutions.

The online survey of 5,000 IT professionals charged with compliance and audit responsibilities at enterprises with revenues between $200 million and $1 billion was conducted by PacketMotion, the pioneers of User Activity Management, an innovative approach to improving the operational efficiency of audit and compliance controls. In the survey, 84 percent of survey respondents ranked leveraging compliance and audit solutions for more general security requirements as “important” or “very important.”

However, the survey also demonstrated how much difficulty organizations are having trying to achieve this goal. Queried as to the degree to which they are currently able to leverage their compliance or audit solution investments for general risk management and internal security, 76 percent said “in a limited way” or “unable to."

In addition, 60 percent of respondents said they were unable to achieve this leverage because they either didn’t feel the solutions they had could be used this way, or because they didn’t have the staff resources. “The results of this survey articulate a deep desire by enterprises who have already made investments in meeting compliance/audit requirements—the alphabet soup of PCI DSS, SOX, HIPAA, and HITECH—to be able to use these investments for other areas of responsibility such as protecting their networks from general risk and internal threats,” said Paul Smith, CEO at PacketMotion.