McAfee’s APAC Cyber Resiliency and Risk Report reveals that organizations in India describe their culture of cybersecurity as either strategic (60%) or embedded (33%).
The survey, covering 480 cybersecurity decision-makers across eight Asia-Pacific countries including Australia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and Thailand, also revealed that 97% of the organizations in India were familiar with the concept of cyber-resilience compared to Australia (73%) and New Zealand (75%).
According to the report, 98% of Indian enterprises are likely to invest more in security due to regulation. India is most likely to have ‘high’ impact (58%) of cybersecurity incidents on the business compared to Singapore (42%) and Australia (16%).
An astounding 93% of organizations in India believe that they are cyber-resilient, taking the top position amongst all the other countries in the region.
Cyber resilience refers to an entity’s ability to continuously deliver the intended outcome despite adverse cyber events. The concept essentially brings the areas of information security, business continuity and organizational resilience together.
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The report says that cyber resiliency functions such as data protection, response and recovery planning, response and recovery communications were identified as areas that IT would like to see improved by 2021 in relation to their cybersecurity maturity levels,
“The objective of cyber resilience is to enhance an entity’s ability to deliver the intended outcome continuously at all times. While organizations 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, McAfee India.
“Organizations 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.”
Enterprises in India are at different stages of their digital transformation journey. Organisations have either been ‘always’ digitally focused or have fully implemented digital transformation or at the nascent stages. Organisations in the technology/IT sector are much more likely than other types of businesses to be at an advanced stage of digital transformation.
As the cyber threat landscape continues to evolve, cybersecurity is fast becoming an integral part of digital transformation, with 49% ‘extremely’ involved and 41% ‘very involved’ in the digital transformation process, according to the report.
Data breach (62%), data tampering (49%) and fraud (43%) were predicted to be the top three risks enterprises will be prone to in 2021.
The report revealed that an enterprise faced up to 120 data breaches on an average in the past year, with the respondents across APAC, estimating an average loss of USD $298,812. Larger organizations were prone to more cyber incidents but organizations with more than 500 staff suffered an average of 209 incidents, which is almost 8 times higher than businesses with 50 to 100 employees.