For its part, Dell acknowledges that 15 percent of its products move through the channel. The manufacturer notes that because it has no formal VAR program, its performance in the polls reflect its abilities to deal with customers, including VARs who typically work with Dell at the request of their clients. The satisfaction poll, conducted in two phases, first asked VARs to name the vendors they sold in each of 26 categories and to indicate which they could rate. Overall satisfaction ratings were obtained by averaging scores from each area, for each category. Ironically, large companies are more often victimized than smaller businesses.
Viruses are partially responsible for a slight increase in security breaches.
Only 24 percent of respondents this year reported no breaches, down from 27 percent in 1998. Downtime is up 14 percent this year at sites that have had breaches, including viruses. On a positive note, the number of sites saying the source of breaches is unknown fell to 13 percent this year, from 20 percent in 1998, indicating that companies are getting better at monitoring network activity. In particular, improved firewalls have blocked more breaches and identified sources of unauthorized access. The study found 75 percent of sites using firewalls, with 45 percent finding breaches by analyzing server or firewall logs.