Dive Brief:
- Enterprises are increasing their information security spending and collaborating more on threat intelligence efforts, according to the latest Global State of Information Security Survey.
- Overall, survey respondents reported a 38% increase in detected incidents in 2015 over the year before.
- Financial losses from cyber attacks also decreased from $2.7 million in 2014 to $2.5 million this year.
Dive Insight:
The report, which was based on a survey of 10,000 IT and security decision-makers in 127 nations, included some rare good news when it comes to IT security. But not all the news was good. Companies reported they are also seeing more intellectual property theft, which jumped 56% over the previous year, and there has been a surge in breaches attributed to current and former partners and suppliers (up to 59% in 2015, from 46% in 2014).
The study also found that the enterprise move to cloud platforms is creating great change in how enterprises protect their applications and data. Sixty-nine percent of respondents said they now use cloud-based security services.
“The only way to effectively perform security in this new environment is to do it at cloud scale,” said Tyler Shields, a security analyst at Forrester Research. “That means you have to actually be able to capture data, analyze data, analyze security related metadata and data, and then make decisions based on it and enforce your security controls; because to do anything less means that they'll never be able to keep up with the pace of the movement of the data."
The study also found that cyber insurance is now one of the fastest-growing segments in insurance. Fifty-nine percent of respondents to the survey said they had now purchased some level of cyber insurance. PwC forecasts the global cyber insurance market growth from $2.5 billion this year to $7.5 billion by 2020.
