Survey Indicates More Businesses Are Heavily Investing in Cybersecurity

A survey from Splunk and Enterprise Strategy Group indicates that organizations tend to invest a significant amount of their capital into cybersecurity. Even more interesting is that 88 percent of respondents in this survey reported that they would increase these investments, with 35 percent reporting that they will be substantial. What other insights can we glean from this survey?

Of particular note is how nasty and commonplace some of these cyberattacks can get.

How Common are Cyberattacks?

The data provided by this survey indicates that just over half of the surveyed respondents found an increase in cyberattacks, with 53 percent of them confirming that there was an increase in attacks during the pandemic. Zooming out a bit, 84 percent of these respondents found that they experienced a significant cybersecurity incident within 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

These attacks have had a plethora of consequences and costs for businesses that suffer from them. Here are some of them:

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’s also important to consider that security leaders and professionals have both reported that their jobs have become harder (49 percent). These leaders and professionals have cited the shifting landscape of threats (48 percent), transitioning to the cloud and those challenges (32 percent), and workplace hiring (28 percent) as some of the ways in which their jobs have been made more difficult.

It also does not help that the adoption of cloud-based solutions was so rushed by the COVID-19 pandemic that it has led to shortcomings and challenges regarding cloud usage.