Storage and security

Companies are undermining security strides they’ve made because they don’t properly enforce best practices concerning privileged accounts and data stored in the cloud.

A full 82% of respondents believe the security industry in general is making progress against cyber-attacks.

71% of organizations increased their budget for perimeter defenses. Yet only 24% cited a perimeter breach as the attack stage most difficult to mitigate, and 12% cited it as a top concern.

Cyber-attacks or tactics that concern IT decision-makers the most over the next 12 months include distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks (19%), phishing (14%), ransomware (13%), privileged account exploitation (12%) and perimeter breaches (12%).

79% of respondents said their organizations have learned lessons from major publicized security breaches and are taking appropriate actions to improve security.

75% of IT decision-makers now believe they can prevent attackers from breaking into their internal networks, up from 44% in 2015.

Although the majority of IT decision-makers believe they can prevent cyber-attacks, 36% believe a cyber-attacker is currently or has been in the last 12 months on their network, and 46% believe their organization was a victim of a ransomware attack in the past two years.

The top actions implemented to better protect against cyber-attacks include the deployment of malware detection (25%), endpoint security (24%) and security analytics (16%).

55% of respondents said their organizations have changed processes for managing privileged accounts, and 71% use a privileged account security solution.

Yet 40% still store privileged and admin passwords in a Word document or spreadsheet, and 28% use a shared server or USB stick.

49% of organizations allow third-party vendors remote access to their internal networks. But some verticals lag in vendor access controls: in the public sector, 21% of organizations are not securing and 33% are not monitoring this activity.

A full 95% of organizations have a cyber-security emergency response plan. But only 45% communicate and regularly test their plans with all IT staff, and 57% aren’t certain of their role in response to cyber-attacks.

68% of organizations cite losing customer data as one of their biggest concerns following a cyber-attack. Yet 60% who use the cloud store customer data in it, and 57% who store info in the cloud are not completely confident in their cloud providers’ ability to protect their data.