One in 10 German companies was breached in the past year, survey shows

Some 12 percent of companies in Germany were breached in the past year, and most IT decision makers don’t know how their company was breached, according to a Bitdefender survey of 100 German respondents.

A third of IT decision makers feel their job is given more importance in the company than ever, while 12 percent say their job has completely changed in recent years. However, some 34% of IT decision makers fear the financial compensation the company might have to pay in a security breach, while 44% even fear losing their job. Even though seven in 10 IT decision makers perceive IT security as a top priority for their companies, they think budgets need to increase by 8 percent to deliver efficient IT security policies.

Cloud security spending increased at 36 percent of the companies in the past year, while the IT security budget for other security activities remained the same, Bitdefender’s survey shows. While almost half of IT decision makers say the security budget is sufficient, the rest would need an increase of 8 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 IT decision makers, they say only 74 percent of cyberattacks can be stopped, detected or prevented with the current resources, on average.

This survey was conducted in October 2016 by iSense Solutions for Bitdefender on 100 IT security purchase professionals (CIOs/CEOs/CISOs – 27 percent, IT managers/directors – 39 percent, IT system administrators – 25 percent, IT support specialists – 5 percent, and others), from enterprises with 1,000+ PCs based in Germany.

Download the full German version of the report here.