Half of UK companies increased cloud security spending in the past year

Cloud security spending increased for 49 percent of UK companies in the past year, while the IT security budget for other security activities remained the same, according to a Bitdefender survey of 153 IT decision makers in the United Kingdom in companies with more than 1,000 PCs.

While almost two-thirds of IT decision makers say the security budget is sufficient, the rest would need a future increase of 30 percent, on average, to deliver efficient IT security policies. This is mainly because migrating information from traditional data centers to a cloud infrastructure has significantly increased companies’ attackable surface, bringing new threats and more worries to CIO offices regarding the safety of their data. From the total base of the IT decision makers, they say only 55 percent of cyberattacks can be stopped, detected or prevented with the current resources, on average.

2016 gave rise to unknown security challenges that IT decision makers have to prevent by adopting breakthrough technologies able to fight zero-day exploits, Advanced Persistent Threats, and other devastating types of cybercrime. Furthermore, virtualization and adoption of hybrid environments have significantly increased the attack surface, causing more headaches for those who have to secure all infrastructures, physical or not. More businesses are entrusting more sensitive data and workloads to cloud providers, as 63 percent of companies already run IT operations in the cloud, 36 percent operations, 34 percent customer service, marketing and sales, and 32 percent finance too, as a report by PwC shows. The hybrid cloud market will grow at a compound annual rate of 27% until 2019, according to research firm MarketsandMarkets, as cited by The Journal. The company expects the hybrid cloud market to more than triple to $85 billion in 2019, from $25 billion in 2014. Gartner surveyed attendees at one of its tech conferences and found that nearly 75% of large enterprises there planned to have hybrid IT deployments, as in the hybrid cloud, by the end of last year. Large companies that have invested heavily in on-premise architectures and migrated data to the cloud will be the biggest ambassadors of the hybrid model.

Even though nine in 10 IT decision makers in the UK perceive IT security as a top priority for their companies, they think the budgets need to increase by a third to deliver efficient IT security policies. Bitdefender’s survey shows 30 percent of companies were breached in the past 12 months, while 87 percent of IT decision makers don’t know how the company was breached.

This survey was conducted in October 2016 by iSense Solutions for Bitdefender on 153 IT security purchase professionals (CIOs/CEOs/ CISOs – 30 percent, IT managers/directors – 48 percent, IT system administrators – 9 percent, IT support specialists – 10 percent, and others), from enterprises with 1,000+ PCs based in the United Kingdom.

Read the full paper here.