Where are Business’ Security Priorities Right Now?

According to a survey conducted by Splunk and Enterprise Strategy Group, more business leaders intend to funnel funding into their cybersecurity—88 percent of respondents reporting a planned increase into their investments, 35 percent reporting that these boosts will be substantial. Let’s examine a few of the insights that this survey has revealed.

To begin, it’s important to acknowledge how severe and prevalent cyberattacks can be.

How Common are Cyberattacks?

Based on the data returned by this survey, just over half of surveyed respondents saw an increase in cyberattacks, 53 percent confirming that there was an increase in attacks throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. 84 percent of these respondents have seen a significant cybersecurity incident sometime in the past two years.

These attacks broke down as follows:

• Email compromise attacks (42 percent)
• Data breaches (39 percent)
• Mobile malware (37 percent)
• DDoS attacks (36 percent)
• Phishing (33 percent)
• Ransomware (31 percent)
• Compliance and regulation violations (28 percent)

Costs Associated with These Cyberattacks

Of course, these various attacks can result in an equal variety of consequences and costs to the businesses impacted by them. For instance…

• 40 percent of surveyed businesses stated that the cost of the time spent by IT to resolve the impacts of security incidents was the largest expense that these incidents caused.
• 36 percent cited lost productivity as their primary cost.
• 35 percent blamed system and application disruption.
• 32 percent prioritized the disruption that their business processes experienced.
• 28 percent were most concerned about breaches of confidential data (with 19 percent concerned about disclosing these breaches).
• 18 percent stressed about their employees being prosecuted or terminated.

It also should be said that security leaders and professionals alike have reported their jobs becoming more challenging, 49 percent reporting in the affirmative. Furthermore, they specifically cited a shifting landscape in terms of threats (48 percent), transitioning a business’ workload into the cloud and the challenges that this process brings about (32 percent), and workplace hiring (28 percent).

Furthermore, the rushed adoption that the COVID-19 pandemic encouraged of cloud-based solutions has led to a few shortcomings and challenges related to cloud usage.

Therefore, Businesses Need to Ensure their Cloud Solutions Are Properly Secured

With more threats leveraged against businesses via cloud solutions, it is all the more important that these solutions are properly secured. Managed IT Force can help your business accomplish this. To find out how our team can assist you in terms of your security, give us a call at 724-473-3950.