After a lot of research, writing and editing, we’re delighted to finally launch the second edition of our State of Cybersecurity Report.
As we explained in our previous article, the idea of this is to survey a sample of our industry about what they thought were the main drivers for cybersecurity, free from commercial influence and marketing incentive.
This year we interviewed 60 professionals from across the industry and globe, and asked them what they felt the drivers are. We took those responses, triaged the common findings and present them to you in a new whitepaper. Without giving away the full results, which are available in the free download, the main findings are around the concepts of technology integration failures and detection problems, the human element of cybersecurity and the continued efforts to engage the board in security and privacy issues.
Two notable points raised in this year’s report feature around the constant trends of compliance and automation. Firstly, compliance topped the poll in our 2018 report and while it does remain in the top five this year, it seems that not being in preparation for the GDPR deadline has reduced its impact.
Among the responses, respondents indicated that regulatory controls will remain a driver in the EU and beyond, and many noted that the introduction of GDPR has had both positive and negative impacts. Some mention concerns around how the ‘shelving’ of projects to make way for compliance projects may have hindered the industry, while others mention the failures of data protection regulators to actually push the regulatory charges. However, they believe GDPR and other compliance regulations have done a lot to promote the cause for effective incident response.
Another interesting trend is around automation. In last year’s report, adoption of AI and automation technologies was cited by 28% of respondents as a future trend with the consensus on AI apparently bridging two gaps – the lack of people, and the need to meet the demands of threats and alerts. Last year, this trend did not appear at all in the current drivers, while this year it does make the top five, being cited by 18% of respondents as a current driver, while 36% of respondents cited it as a future trend.
It seems that there is still hype around AI technology and that is leading to levels of suspicion, as one respondent said that AI “offers immense value and fear” and a year on from claiming that its benefits do seem to outweigh the negatives in terms of what it can offer, not much has changed. However, Infosecurity did talk to several users who were proponents of its capabilities.
The report is available for download now, and we hope you find it useful and insightful.