Survey shows Indian companies most familiar with concept of cybersecurity in APAC region

PUNE: More than half of Indian organisations surveyed by cybersecurity firm McAfee described their culture of cybersecurity as strategic (60%) or embedded (33%).

The APAC Cyber Resiliency and Risk Report, covering 480 cybersecurity decision makers in eight Asia Pacific countries, said that 97% of companies in India covered by in the survey were familiar with the concept of cybersecurity compared with 73% in Australia and 75% in New Zealand.

The report, released on Tuesday, said that 98% of Indian companies surveyed said they were likely to invest more in security due to regulation. India is most likely to have ‘high’ impact (58%) of cybersecurity incidents on businesses compared with 42% in Singapore and 16% in Australia.

India also topped the list in belief in cyber-resilience–93% organisations said they believed they are cyber resilient. Cyber resilience refers to an entity’s ability to continuously deliver the intended outcome despite adverse cyber events. This encompasses areas like information security, business continuity and organisational resilience. Cyber resiliency functions such as data protection, response and recovery planning, and response and recovery communications were identified as areas that IT would like to see improved by 2021 in relation to their cybersecurity maturity levels, according to the report.

“While organisations can put a cost on cybersecurity damages related to a data breach, reputational damage, impact on sales and other areas are difficult to measure, implying that the level of belief that a cost can be placed is higher than expected,” said Sanjay Manohar, managing director of McAfee India. “Organisations in India are most likely to have ‘high’ impact of cybersecurity incidents. Therefore, involvement of cybersecurity in digital transformation at the management level becomes critical in more developing jurisdictions such as India, where regulation and compliance are evolving and, therefore, may be more of a focus for organisations.”

As the cyber threat landscape continues to evolve, cybersecurity is fast becoming an integral part of digital transformation, with 49% of companies being ‘extremely’ involved and 41% ‘very involved’ in the digital transformation process. Data breach (62%), data tampering (49%) and fraud (43%), were predicted to be the top three risks enterprises will be prone to in 2021, said the report.

Enterprises faced up to 120 data breaches on an average in the last one year, with respondents across APAC estimating an average loss of USD $298,812. Larger organisations were prone to more cyber incidents but organisations with more than 500 staff suffered an average of 209 incidents, which is almost eight times higher than businesses with 50 to 100 employees.

However, there is little difference in detection, response or recovery by country, type of business or size of the organisation.

The survey was conducted by StollzNow Research and the eight Asia Pacific countries covered were Australia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and Thailand.