Research released by Fastly, a global edge cloud platform, titled Fighting Fire With Fire, finds that over three-quarters (78%) of Australian and New Zealand organisations are increasing their cybersecurity spending to protect themselves against future risks with AU$95,000 spent annually just on web applications and API security control and tools.
However, despite this increased budget with 59% agreeing that their organisation’s allocated budget appropriately addresses cybersecurity risk, IT leaders are investing poorly. The result of this is that only 60% of cybersecurity tools are fully active or deployed.
Similarly, due to a scattergun approach to cybersecurity implementation, 38% of these tools overlap, protecting organisations against the same threats and when these tools do run, they often suffer from too many false positives. For example, 42% of alerts detected by organisations’ WAFs are false positives.
As part of this research, IT leaders also predicted the biggest threats to their organisation in the next 12 months, with 37% highlighting data breaches and data loss, 33% phishing and 27% malware as their key areas for concern.
Although 76% of organisations are confident in their organisation’s ability to protect itself against the current cybersecurity threat landscape, the other primary area of concern for these organisations is securing remote workers. Eighty-five percent of IT leaders surveyed expressed concern about the effect of adopting a remote work culture since the pandemic on their cybersecurity strategy.
Indeed, over half (53%) predict that ‘cyberattacks on remote workers’ will drive cybersecurity threats over the next 12 months. As a result, 49% say improving cybersecurity skills through training and or talent acquisition is a security priority over the next year while another top priority includes making cybersecurity more accessible to meet usability requirements.
At the same time, more than two-thirds (67%) of organisations are less confident in their ability to hire talent sufficiently qualified to keep up with changing security technologies. Just under half of organisations (48%) feel there is a lack of experience with relevant security technologies among the current talent pool when it comes to cybersecurity.
The full report contains the five fundamental steps organisations can take to improve their cybersecurity posture, removing unnecessary complexity in the process.
