Last year's data breaches shook Australian businesses

More than half (52%) of Australian business leaders admit to not having invested enough in cybersecurity in the wake of the numerous high-profile data breaches hitting Australian companies during 2022.

Research released by Netskope found that 70% of Australia’s business leaders are ready to increase cybersecurity budgets following the breaches of the year.

The views on the ground are even direr, with 69% of IT professionals within Australian businesses believing their organisation hasn’t invested enough in cybersecurity, and one in three asserting that it hasn’t been a priority.

But 70% are seeing an increase in their leadership’s willingness to invest in cybersecurity in 2023.

The proportion of organisations that are increasing their security budgets this year jumped to 63%, up from 45% who saw increases from 2020 to 2022. Among organisations with more than 200 employees, this grows to 80%.

Netskope CIO and CSO for APAC David Fairman said the findings show that last year’s data breaches have shaken the Australian business community to its core.

“But it seems there is some positive to draw from those events. In the last decade, attitudinal gaps between technology and business leaders regarding cybersecurity have been a key factor slowing down cybersecurity improvements, and it seems that both teams are now — at last — on the same page, ready to bolster cyber defences for their organisation and customers,” he said.

“Even though no organisation is ever fully protected from cyber threats, we need this united front to show cybercriminals that we won’t make it easy for them and Australia won’t be an easy target anymore.”

But the research also found that currently only 27% of Australian tech leaders have well-defined and stringent incident response plans to face a variety of threat scenarios. Meanwhile, respondents are evenly split on whether they would be willing to pay the ransom following a successful ransomware attack.

Image credit: iStock.com/JuSun