Faced with COVID Challenges, Enterprises Increase Security Spending

The security impact of workplace disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has ncreased spending on risk mitigation in organizations worldwide: a recent survey

of security leaders by Dark Reading and Omdia found that about one-third of respondents plan to spend more on cybersecurity because of the pandemic. 

Enterprise leaders show high interest in technologies for securing user identities, cloud services, endpoint devices, and the network edge, and many plan to deploy some of these capabilities over the next 18 months.

The 2021 Enterprise Cybersecurity in a Post-Pandemic World survey shows a lack of confidence in a significant number of organizations when it comes to security challenges caused by the pandemic. Nearly half – 40% of the respondents – say their efforts to keep pace with security challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic leave room for improvement.

Other highlights from the study include:

• 51% of IT security managers expect cyberattacks to increase as the pandemic eases.
• 32% of organizations are still struggling to build secure access methods for remote workers/locations, well over a year into the pandemic.
• 66% of respondents identify ransomware as their top security concern; 57% point to phishing, and 52% are most concerned about malware.
• 39% of survey respondents say COVID-19-related challenges have accelerated changes to their security posture.
• 41% of organizations are migrating — or planning to migrate — away from traditional WAN and remote access VPN solutions to SASE.
• 54% of organizations have already deployed or are planning to deploy endpoint threat detection and response (EDR) technologies in their security operations center.

Read the full report here.