79% of enterprises have increased their adoption of advanced security technologies
Data presented by Atlas VPN reveals that 79% of companies have increased their adoption of advanced security technologies to combat the increase in cyber attacks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Measures taken to combat risks
An analysis of the cyberthreat landscape in the first half of 2021 revealed that both the volume of cyber attacks as well as the development of new malware families increased exponentially.
Companies also expanded their Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies in response to the unexpected increase in remote work and the insufficient supply of company-issued devices. This one alteration had a significant effect on the attack surface.
This research aims to analyze how security teams in large companies (500+ employees) across the globe are defending against the upsurge in threats.
Microfocus, a multinational software and information technology business, gathered responses from 520 respondents across seven different countries and 16+ different industries. By design, respondents were all from companies with 500+ employees and were all at least moderately involved in decision-making for security operations at their organizations. Responses were collected from May 15 until May 31, 2021.
Survey reveals that 85% of large businesses raised their security budgets. If the pandemic thought enterprises one thing, cybersecurity is a business issue, not simply a technological one, and it is no longer seen as a luxury but rather a need.
The same percentage indicated they boosted monitoring and auditing of remote worker privileges. The never-ending wave of data breaches made security teams focus on minimizing the number of administrative privileges granted to employees.
85% of companies also increased their adoption of cloud-security services and technologies. Moving to the cloud provides a number of advantages for businesses, including lower IT expenses, greater flexibility, increased efficiency, and performance. Still, it also requires a brand new set of security measures to protect the cloud infrastructure.
Another significant change was that 84% of businesses boosted their security training budgets. A large percentage of organizations realized how important it is to train their existing security professionals and boost employee security training to avoid a crisis caused by an internal mistake.
An increase in spear-phishing attacks means that criminals target specific victims, which allows them to create a detailed and believable scheme that is hard to detect for an untrained eye.
Imitating a phishing attack within the company is one of the best ways to check how employees respond to bogus emails. This can be done by an in-house professional or by hiring a company that specializes in phishing penetration testing. It might be surprising to find that over 10% of staff blindly click on unsafe links and even provide their credentials.
On the same note, 72% of respondents say that the cybersecurity operations staffing has increased.
Another positive change is that 79% of companies increased deployment of advanced security technologies, like User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA), and Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR).
Final notes
In short, the findings from the survey reveal that security initiatives in large companies have evolved significantly in the past year.
While it was a rough period for those who suffered from a hacker intrusion, they became an example for others of what awaits if they don’t focus on securing their infrastructure with a holistic approach.
It means that companies have to train their employees, hire more security staff, and at the same time implement advanced security technologies, increase the adoption of threat intelligence, and much more.
