Are companies prepared to mitigate cyber attacks?
Syntax, a global provider of IT services and managed cloud solutions, has found that 51% of IT leaders reported they would be unable to successfully mitigate a data breach or ransomware attack.
Their report entitled ‘Innovation Reality Check, A crisis of overconfidence in IT’, revealed that leaders tend to overinflate their actual innovation capabilities. Many executives ranked themselves on the “leading edge,” also known as the top 5% of businesses but when it comes to innovation, their actual capabilities reflect a different picture.
A changing cyber landscape calls for new protection
As today’s business landscape continues to shift to accommodate more permanent hybrid work, emerging technologies to facilitate this method of working requires skilled IT professionals, especially as cyberattacks continue to climb. IT leaders who overestimate their innovation capabilities find themselves at risk of missing out on critical technology that will be the lifeline of their business.
81% of respondents experienced a cyberattack in the last year, but results show that leaders are underprepared for the new cybersecurity landscape. 60% of respondents indicated they were “extremely prepared” to handle a phishing attack — yet phishing was the most common type of attack reported. When it comes to securing the hybrid workplace, almost half (43%) of respondents said they are only somewhat confident their company can protect them from cyberattacks.
This study found that for 94% of leaders, cloud spending was up due to the pandemic, and a mere 1% said they had no budget for cloud over the next year. Companies planning no investments in any technology or processes are in the single digits across the board. This could be due to ongoing talent shortages, as nearly half of respondents (45%) report that they don’t have the talent to migrate to a public cloud.
48% of businesses surveyed have automated more than half of their processes. According to the research, that number will only grow to 58% over the next five years, based on planned spending. The issue holding people back seems to be that 55% of businesses lack IT staff knowledge.
Looking ahead to 2022
Cloud migration and improving cybersecurity tied for first in the areas enterprises say they will “significantly” invest in 2022. But overall, building remote capabilities will draw the most investment in 2022 — only 4% of companies say they won’t invest anything in this area.
In 2022, 44% of companies say they will make significant investments in building business intelligence capabilities. Because these types of capabilities demand high levels of data sophistication and cloud computing, it is becoming increasingly clear that some enterprises are in new stages of the digital transformation process.
