European organisations have an over-confident sense of security when it comes to protecting themselves against cyber threats, according to a new study. Just 68% of respondents to the 2020 Thales Europe Data Threat Report regard themselves as vulnerable – that’s down from 86% in 2018.
This confidence is at odds with the findings elsewhere in the survey of European executives which reveal that 52% of organisations polled were’ breached or failed a compliance audit’ in 2019. Despite this, 20% of respondents say that their organisations intend to cut IT security spend over the coming 12 months.
Across the board, companies are accelerating digitally transformation programmes and move more of their applications and data to cloud-based services. The UK leads all European countries surveyed when it comes to digital transformation: 51% of UK respondents reported themselves as either ‘aggressively disrupting’ their markets or embedding digital capabilities, followed by Germany at 42%.
A key aspect of this transformation is in the cloud becoming the primary data environment for organisations surveyed by Thales: 46% of all data stored by respondent European organisations is now stored in cloud-based repositories, with 43% of that data in the cloud being described as ‘sensitive’.
Despite the multitude of cyber threats, 40% of commercial entities polled say that the complexity of their environments now ‘holds back’ their data security capabilities. Multi-cloud adoption is cited as the main factor in this complexity: 80% of business respondents use more than one IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) vendor, while 29% reckon to have more than 50 SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) applications to manage.
More information:
cpl.thalesgroup.com