ICT and e-business in the tourism industry ICT adoption ... - empirica

Tourism
Hence, if decision makers intend to increase the uptake of OS Software in the tourism
sector, awareness raising measures, especially regarding the advantages of OS
Operating Systems and OS Databases, should be taken. Special emphasis should be put
on the deployment of OS Software in micro and small enterprises which constitute the
vast majority of tourism companies.
3.3.4 ICT security measures
e-Business W@tch analysed security mechanisms used by European enterprises to
counter security threats in its survey of 2005. The results, which were presented in a
special report, 28 indicated that basic components, such as firewalls and secure servers –
for those enterprises which needed these – were already widely used. As a follow-up to
this study, the e-Business Survey 2006 also included questions on specific security
issues.
Secure Server Technology and Firewall
"Secure server technology" means that the data exchange between computers is based
on certain technical standards or protocols, for example "Secure Sockets Layer" (SSL).
SSL is a commonly-used protocol to enable the secure transmission of messages via
internet. SSL has recently been succeeded by Transport Layer Security (TLS) - which is
based on SSL - but SSL itself is still widely used. 29 In the tourism industry, about 17% of
all firms said they use Secure Server Technology (see Exhibit 3-13). While the figures for
SMEs in the tourism industry are comparable to the average figures for the 10 sectors
studied this year, deployment of secure server technologies among large firms appears to
be higher in tourism than in other sectors (77% in tourism compared to 64% on average
across all 10 sectors).
Secure server technology is generally closely linked with e-commerce. Yet, the
deployment figures for SMEs in tourism are lower than the respective number of
companies that say that they receive orders from customers online (see Exhibit 3-13).
This demonstrates the major importance of electronic marketplaces in the tourism sector.
In contrast, the level of adoption of secure server technology by large tourism companies
is much higher than their e-commerce activity. Obviously, these enterprises use secure
servers for other purposes than to manage their online sales to a larger extent than
smaller companies.
As can be expected, firewalls are widely used by companies from any of the 10 sectors
studied. In the tourism sector, the adoption of this rather basic security measure is slightly
higher than the cross-sectoral average. Interestingly, this holds true for all company size
classes.
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29
See e-Business W@tch Special Study on ICT Security, e-Invoicing and e-Payment Activities in
European Enterprises, September 2005. Available at www.ebusiness-watch.org ('resources').
Cf. Whatis.com (http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com)
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