Assimilation of Security-Related Policies in U.S. Firms: An Empirical Study of Web Assimilation and Related Knowledge as Antecedents

Security-related policies can help organizations safeguard against breaches and other threats and plan for how to respond to events. However, adoption of security, privacy and acceptable use policies, audit processes and disaster recovery, and business continuance planning may lag behind an organization´s efforts to leverage the benefits of web-based technologies. This paper presents findings from a study of security-related policy assimilation. Assimilation is designed to measure the level of adoption. We examine the antecedents of assimilation--e.g., an organization´s web strategy, business activities conducted on the web, and the existence of security related knowledge as predictors of assimilation.