CrowdStrike Inc., the developer of cloud-delivered endpoint protection solutions, stated that organizations are seeing cybersecurity as a top priority in 2020.
In its recent survey, “2020 CrowdStrike Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) State of Cybersecurity Report” the company stated that 74% of respondents believe there should be more investment in cybersecurity to enhance organizations’ security posture. Nearly, 44% of security leaders said the pandemic accelerated their move to cloud solutions, while 82% said COVID-19 changed the way they interact or deliver products and services to customers. CrowdStrike also found a jump in cybercrimes by over 330% since the start of the year, as compared to cybercrimes in 2019.
Other notable findings include:
- Though organizations have changed their IT environments to accommodate remote workers, 39% of respondents have not changed their security programs because of COVID-19, potentially exposing their organizations to cyber risks from new and more sophisticated attacks.
- Employee education and communication are key to a successful cybersecurity strategy, yet 20% of business leaders do not know what to do in the event of a data breach, and 36% of respondents have not received communications about COVID-19 themed malware. Moving forward, 76% of APJ business leaders say they plan on additional security training in the future.
- As we look to the new normal, 67% of business leaders believe that their organizations should invest more in building a remote work environment.
- The top cybersecurity challenges expected in the next 18 months include remote workforce (54%), new regulation (49%) and costs of compliance (48%), with limited budgets (47%) and additional training (41%) ranking not far behind.
Andrew Littleproud, Vice President, APJ at CrowdStrike, said, “The speed and size of change to a remote workforce led to some inevitable gaps, particularly in the cybersecurity of organizations. Business leaders understand these gaps and expect to address them in the recovery, going beyond good enough’ security measures to ensure their employees remain secure against sophisticated threat activity regardless of where they are located. In the new business normal, it will be vital to implement solutions that can be quickly deployed at scale to detect new threats, adhere to new regulations, and leverage the cloud so they can be easily managed remotely.”
The survey findings are based on the responses from 2,017 business leaders in Australia, New Zealand, India, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Japan.
