78% Lack Confidence in Their Company’s Cybersecurity Posture, Prompting 91% to Increase 2021 Budgets

Predictive AnalyticsArtificial Intelligence (AI)

By STS News Desk On Feb 25, 2021

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Nearly 80% of senior IT and IT security leaders believe their organizations lack sufficient protection against cyberattacks despite increased IT security investments made in 2020 to deal with distributed IT and work-from-home challenges, according to a new IDG Research Services survey commissioned by Insight Enterprises (NASDAQ: NSIT), the global integrator of Insight Intelligent Technology Solutions™ for organizations of all sizes.

That high level of concern over the ability to withstand cyberthreats in today’s complex IT environment is causing 91% of organizations to increase their cybersecurity budgets in 2021, nearly matching the 96% that boosted IT security spending in 2020, according to the survey by Insight’s Cloud + Data Center Transformation team.

The survey, “Cybersecurity at a Crossroads: The Insight 2021 Report,” examined the impact of the distributed IT landscape and pandemic-related transition to a remote workforce on IT security, including shifts in modernization priorities, projects undertaken in 2020, and major obstacles faced in strengthening cybersecurity defenses. Respondents included more than 200 C-level IT and IT security executives in organizations with an average of 21,300 employees across a wide range of industries.

At a top level, the survey found that 78% lack confidence in their company’s IT security posture and believe improvements are needed. Respondents expressed the least confidence in their organization’s security roadmap (32%), security-related technology and tools (30%), and internal teams and skill sets (27%). They reported the highest level of trust in their company’s data management strategy, but even then, less than half (45%) voiced confidence in this aspect of security operations.

Among other key findings:

1. Cybersecurity is being integrated into multiple aspects of the business, indicating rising recognition of the risk that a cyberattack poses to company operations. Fully 100% of survey respondents report that their boards and executive teams are more focused on their organization’s security posture than in the past. In addition, 68% initiated projects to integrate incident response into companywide business continuity plans, 61% are integrating cybersecurity into infrastructure and DevOps decisions, and 59% are incorporating IT security into broader business operations decisions to better combat cyberthreats.

2. Companies shifted cybersecurity modernization priorities in 2020 in response to the immediate challenges presented by the pandemic,accelerating an average of five to six initiatives to protect the increasingly distributed IT environment and securely connect a remote workforce with the data needed to keep businesses running. Most companies pursued multiple projects in categories including threat visibility/identification (73%), incident response (70%), network security (68%), endpoint security (67%), application security (67%), malware protection (64%) and identity and access management (55%).

3. Most complex, long-range security projects took a back seat to block-and-tackle activities such as anti-malware/anti-virus upgrades, multi-factor authentication and Firewall as a Service (FWaaS) deployments. As a result, relatively few organizations initiated or executed projects in critical areas like identity governance, Zero Trust, data analytics, AI/machine learning and SASE implementations.

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