Rubrik, the Zero Trust data security company, has announced the Australian findings from its inaugural State of Data Security report, commissioned by Rubrik and conducted by Wakefield Research.
Among the key findings regarding the most pressing challenge, Australian cybersecurity leaders face in securing their organisation’s data was ‘insufficient talent in IT and SecOps’, cited by 26% of respondents as the top security challenge.
More than 120 Australian respondents including CIOs, CISOs, IT and cybersecurity leaders were interviewed as part of Rubrik Zero Labs’ The State of Data Security – The Human Impact of Cybercrime report, with more than 1,600 leaders worldwide taking part in the research.
With a lack of security talent, 96% of Australian security and IT leaders said they’re concerned they won’t be able to maintain Business Continuity if they experienced a cyberattack in the next year.
Dale Heath, CTO at Rubrik Australia and New Zealand, said the spate of recent data breaches is collectively Australia’s turning point, causing local business leaders to become acutely aware of the risk of cyberattacks: “The recent wave of cyberattacks have highlighted the lack of visibility and control organisations have into their environment. If you’re unable to answer questions like ‘what sensitive data do I have?’ and, more importantly, ‘where is that data stored?’, how can you begin to understand the risk associated with it?
“This ‘Road to Damascus moment’ is forcing Australian businesses to accept that a breach is inevitable – once you’ve taken this crucial first step, the way you protect your sensitive data changes drastically.”
The top five challenges local security leaders face in securing their data highlights a lack of essential resources – particularly skilled talent. When asked what their most pressing data security challenge was, Australian organisations cited:
- Insufficient talent in IT and SecOps
- Insufficient budget for data security
- Lack of cybersecurity tools and solutions in place
- Haven’t adequately addressed vulnerabilities from previous attacks
- Disagreement between different teams on how to protect against cyberattacks
Additional Australian findings from the report include:
- When faced with ransomware specifically, 73% of Australian respondents said they’d consider paying the ransom with almost half (47%) saying that they’d be ‘extremely’ or ‘very likely’ to pay the ransom
- Although zero-day attacks receive much of the cybersecurity industry’s attention, few Australian security leaders see it as their top threat in the coming year. The threats of most concern to local organisations were data breaches (31%), phishing (22%), denial of service attacks (17%), ransomware (16%), then zero-day exploits (14%)