Infosec Professionals Are More Worried About Corporate Security than Their Own Home Security

New research indicates that infosec professionals are more concerned about their employers’ security than the security of their own home, with the vast majority saying recent data breaches in the business sector have increased their organization’s focus on securing data.

Data security has become a nemesis for IT professionals. A patchwork approach, misconfigured services and confusion around new cloud security models has created a crisis of confidence among information security professionals. According to the Oracle and KPMG Cloud Threat Report 2020, this issue will only be fixed if businesses make security part of their culture.

Almost three quarters of organizations have or plan to hire a CISO with more cloud security skills, and over half of organizations have, in fact, added a new role called Business Information Security Officer (BISO) to collaborate with the CISO and help integrate security culture into the business.

Fear and trust issues experienced by IT professionals is echoed in a recent Bitdefender study showing half of security professionals in large organizations across the US, EMEA and APAC are literally losing sleep worrying about their organizational cybersecurity posture.

Asked if they’ve ever been “kept awake at night” out of concern their company might get hacked, half of the respondents in our study answered “sure” without hesitation. Asked what causes the most stress in their role, 36% of CISOs cited a “lack of cybersecurity understanding from general employees.”

The KPMG report reveals these fears are not only ongoing, but that they’ve mushroomed in recent months.The study found that IT professionals are more concerned about the security of their company’s data than the security of their own home.

“IT professionals are 3X more concerned about the security of company financials and intellectual property than their home security,” the study says.

80 percent worry that the cloud service providers they deal with will become competitors in their core markets, highlighting IT professionals’ concerns that cloud service providers might steal their intellectual property. 75 percent of IT professionals also said they view the public cloud as more secure than their own data centers. However, 92 percent of IT professionals do not believe their organization is well prepared to secure public cloud services.

In another key finding, around 80 percent of IT professionals say that recent data breaches experienced by their competitors have increased their organization’s focus on securing data.