Wednesday 29 April 2015

Cyber Budgets Rise with Increase in Cyber Threat

More than half of CIOs in the CIO 100 said their organisation had detected a cyber intrusion in the last 12 months, with a massive 95% responding security had risen up their management agenda - although not as many were seeing a corresponding increase in their budget to support this.
Some 56% of CIOs in the 2015 CIO 100 across industry - including local government, charities, retail, financial services, utilities, the NHS, media, universities, and manufacturing - responded they had detected a security breach in the last year, showing the cyber threat is a constant worry for CIOs whether you are supporting underprivileged children and aid workers worldwide, handling billions of pounds in financial assets, protecting intellectual property in the pharmaceutical industry, selling top-end boutique men's fashion or serving millions of healthcare patients in the UK.
And while 19 in 20 said cyber security had risen up their management agenda and 91% responded that they felt their organisation fully understood the threat posed by cyber intrusions, 73% also revealed cyber concerns had led to an increase in their security budget.
How do you create that threat awareness within in your company?
Creating that Security awareness and bridging the gap between Security and end users (including Board members) can be a key ingredient to growing the budget and essentially creating a common language that is understood and put into practice. 
Initiating a corporate IT security responsibility that is developed and continually built upon is a hard subject to tackle. At ZeroDayLab we are seeing more and more companies come to us for this kind of training and expertise as the increase in the use of social engineering as a key tactic for cybercriminals now puts staff at the centre of an effective IT security strategy.  Success now depends on a more holistic approach that doesn't uniquely centre on technology solutions.  Whilst they are a critical part of the strategy, hackers have become more personal in their approach, tailoring their targets to an organisation and its employees.  
From our perspective, as being seen by the CIO 100 report, Information Security must be a board level debate from the Top 100 down, whatever the size of a company, it is a target.  So the question is, how do you get C-suite buy-in when it involves them spending yet more money?


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