Seven in eight organizations are experiencing a shortfall of security talent

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A recent report by CyberEdge analyzed the recent threat landscape and how it affects security leaders in the workplace. Last year, according to the survey, 78% of ransomware victims faced the consequences of one, two or three additional threats unless they paid the ransom. Additional threats include launching distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks (42%), notifying customers or the media of the data breach (42%) and publicly releasing exfiltrated data (40%).

The percentage of survey respondents who believe it’s more likely than not that their employers will be victimized by a successful cyberattack of some kind in the coming year declined for the first time in six years, from 76% to 72%. In addition, their overall concern about cyberthreats ticked down. One factor contributing to the improving sentiment: the percentage of organizations experiencing at least one successful attack in 2022 (85%) declined for the second consecutive year. Additionally, at nearly all companies with a board of directors (97%), information security leaders engage board members directly. More than half (51%) provide monthly, quarterly or annual cyber risk assessments reports to the board.

According to the survey, among the most sought-after security technologies in 2023 are next-generation firewalls (network security category), deception technology (endpoint security category), bot management (application and data security category) and full packet capture and analysis (security management and operations category). The vast majority of organizations are adopting emerging security technologies such as zero trust network architectures (ZTNA; 92%), extended detection and response (XDR; 93%) and secure access service edge (SASE; 93%).

Seven in eight organizations (87%) are experiencing a shortfall of security talent, with IT security administrators in greatest demand. Security professionals cite “lack of skilled personnel” as the top inhibitor to defending against cyberthreats. The average information security budget went up by 5.3% in 2023.

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