When it comes to physical and information security, the telecommunications industry ranks among the best-positioned sectors of the U.S. economy, according to Forrester analyst Richard Fichera.

I interviewed Fichera when he was in Washington, D.C. recently to speak at the 2005 Homeland & Global Security Summit. While the summit dealt mostly with the issues facing government agencies trying to counter terrorism and respond to disasters, Fichera and I spoke about the progress that private industry has made in improving security since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Fichera says that the telecommunications and financial services segments have done a better job of beefing up their security processes and technology than other industry segments that control what's considered critical infrastructure for the nation's economy.

"These sectors understand the importance of IT security and resilience, and they have more people on staff that understand this," Fichera says. "There are some Wall Street houses that are spending between 9% and 11% of their revenues on IT. These companies understand that the bits are their products."

Fichera says that the telecom industry is in "pretty good shape and the networks themselves are designed to be reliable." But he admits that the changing ownership of all the major ISPs could have a trickle-down effect in terms of hurting the morale of telecom workers and, therefore, the effectiveness of network operations.

However, Fichera points out that enterprise buyers of Internet services are gaining redundancy because wireless communications can now serve as a more realistic backup for wireline communications.

The industry segments that Fichera says are lagging in security are electricity, petrochemical, natural gas, oil, smoke stack manufacturing, food transportation and food distribution.

"The utilities in particular are more exposed on a physical level with miles of power lines that are hard to protect," he says. "The consequences of an attack for the utilities are also more severe."

Fichera's opinions should be good news for corporate network managers, who are increasingly dependent on ISPs for their mission-critical voice and data networks. Fichera is bullish on the performance and reliability of the Internet in particular.