63% Indian IT Leaders Cite Cybersecurity As One Of Their C-Suite’s Top-3 Business Concerns: Report

New report suggests that 63 per cent of Indian IT leaders cite cybersecurity as one of their C-suite’s top-three business concerns.

The report found that this concern is ahead of issues such as meeting compliance requirements (53 per cent) and supply chain/logistics management (45 per cent).

Out of the 150 Indian IT Leaders, despite sizable increases in their cybersecurity investment, greater board visibility and increased collaboration between the security team and the C-suite, more than half of them (51 per cent) say that they are managing cybersecurity risks from threat.

However, a large majority report being either “fully-prepared” or “somewhat prepared” to respond to major threats, such as recovering from cyberattacks (51 per cent) or identifying and mitigating threats and areas of concern (50 per cent). When asked to name the top three cybersecurity challenges their organisation is facing, migrating and operating apps to the cloud led the way (50 per cent), followed by a lack of visibility of vulnerabilities across all infrastructure (47 per cent) and security exposure created by legacy applications (44 per cent).

In a statement, Karen O’Reilly-Smith, Chief Security Officer, Rackspace Technology said, “As the survey results demonstrate, cybersecurity continues to be far and away the leading business concern and a major focus of IT investment, but with talent at a premium more organisations are looking outside their four walls for guidance in this new cloud-first world.”  

Despite the economic challenges brought about by the pandemic, organisations show no sign of decreasing their investment in cybersecurity, with 87 per cent of survey respondents reporting that their cybersecurity budgets have increased over the past three years. The leading recipients of this new investment are cloud native security (69 per cent), data security (55 per cent), infrastructure detection and response (51 per cent) and consultative security services (44 per cent). According to the survey, cloud native security is also the area where organizations are most likely to rely on an outside partner for expertise.  

The survey was conducted by Coleman Parkes Research in July 2022.

These investments align closely with the areas where organisations perceive their greatest concentration of threats, led by network security (61 per cent), closely followed by web application attacks (53 per cent) and cloud architecture attacks (53 per cent).  

The survey also looked closely at the relationship between security teams, boards and C-suite executives. 76 per cent of respondents say there has been an increase in board visibility for cybersecurity over the past five years, while 76 per cent cite better collaboration between the security team and members of the C-suite. Only 7 per cent of respondents said there were significant communications gaps between the security team and C-suite, while 75 per cent of IT executives view their counterparts in the C-suite as advocates for their concerns.