February 18, 2021

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Today’s companies are increasingly leveraging digital transformation to survive in a dynamic and unpredictable business world. Enterprises are relying on digital technology in all business areas to enhance profitability and efficiency.

In 2021, there are more than 4 billion internet users, approximately 1.8 billion websites, and more than 337 billion GB worth of internet traffic, half of which is generated through mobile phones.

There are many benefits to this new landscape. Overall, digital transformation enhances data collection, improves resource management, provides data-driven customer insights, boosts customer experience, reduces costs, and increases profits. However, despite benefits that come with wide technology adoption, organizations and individuals are at risk of cyberattacks.

Cybersecurity in the New Year

Digital Transformation Increases the Threat of Hackers

Many organizations have good intentions, but the reality is that those that adopt technologies like cloud services do not always do so in a coherent manner. With providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, it’s a breeze to acquire cloud servers in seconds, all by yourself. Ninety percent of companies are now using some type of cloud service, with 77 percent of enterprises running at least one application or a portion of it in the cloud. An organization utilizes more than 1000 different cloud services on average. At the same time, more than half of organizations store confidential data using cloud technology.

The unfortunate result is that the unplanned acquisition of such cloud resources has become a nightmare for security experts, who lack visibility in the process. Indeed, cloud services contain systems and information that can expose a business to attacks in case of misconfigurations—besides, lack of visibility results in undetected vulnerabilities that hackers exploit to steal crucial data.

Worsening Shortage of Cybersecurity Professionals

On top of the expanding attack surface, the cybersecurity skills gap is widening. Recent data reveal that the skills shortage issue impacts 70 percent of organizations. With a small security team, businesses must deal with long-standing open jobs, increased training or junior staff, and an inability to utilize security technologies to their full potential. The estimate for the additional trained staff needed to close the skills gap is approximately 4.07 million professionals worldwide.

There is a tremendous shortage of security professionals, such as application security specialists, cloud security specialists, and security analysts. With increased migration to the cloud, massive demand for software products, and continuous shift to remote work, the worsening skill shortage and its consequences cannot be ignored.

Enterprises Increase Their Spending on Cybersecurity

Enterprises’ spending on cybersecurity continues to increase even as the pandemic-driven economic downturn affects global IT budgets. Last year, many companies entered situations where they needed to respond, including making wise decisions on their resources to remain afloat. Even though they revised budgets, cybersecurity still remained a top concern.

Undoubtedly, the coronavirus crisis created new opportunities for cybercriminals. Experts predicted that 70 percent of organizations would increase cybersecurity spending following the COVID-19 pandemic. By the same token, around 55 percent of major organizations will increase their investments in automation solutions, smart analytics, and artificial intelligence that enhance defense mechanisms. Worldwide spending on cybersecurity will top out at 133.7 billion US dollars in 2022, and the global cybersecurity market size is forecasted to grow to 248.26 billion US dollars by 2023.

The Growing Threat of Cyberattacks

The pandemic has presented new components to the cybersecurity equation, leading to a cyber pandemic. The increased shift to remote work exposed weaknesses in employee awareness and company networks. Cybercriminals leveraged phishing and other attacks to target companies.

The most common cyberattacks include malware attacks, denial of service (DoS), distributed denial of service (DDoS), man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks, phishing, password attacks, and SQL injection.

A study quantified the near-constant rate of hacker attacks on computers, revealing that a data breach occurs every 39 seconds on average. Security experts predict cybercrime-related damage to hit 6 trillion US dollars annually by 2021.

Growing Monetary Losses Due to Data Breaches

Currently, data breaches and security incidents are becoming increasingly costly. U.S. organizations face high expenditures, with an average of 8.19 million US dollars per breach, up 5.3 percent in 2019. The average total spending on an insider threat incident, including monitoring, escalation, incident response, containment, investigation, and remediation, also increased from 513,000 to 756,760 U.S. dollars.

Regular violation costs are another concern that companies suffer. The cybersecurity field is now dominated by a complex regulatory landscape that varies from state-to-state and country-to-country. Marriott and British Airways spent approximately 100 million US dollars each after falling foul of GDPR.

In addition to noncompliance costs, 40 percent of a data breach’s average cost stems from lost business, including lost revenue due to system downtime, high customer turnover, and the new cost of acquiring business after reputational damage.

Using a Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) to Strengthen Your Cybersecurity

As the drive towards digital transformation continues to gain momentum, this is the right time for organizations to stop and reconsider their cybersecurity strategies. Importantly, businesses can partner with managed security service providers, an invaluable resource for companies that want to enhance their cybersecurity posture but lack the resources to build an effective cybersecurity team in-house.

The job of an MSSP is to deliver extensive cybersecurity knowledge and experience in network, cloud, and application security issues that most businesses lack. Without a doubt, an MSSP team possesses current and advanced security knowledge than an in-house team.

Crucially, MSSPs deploy security tools that in-house security teams are not familiar with. Essentially, the service providers are well-positioned to improve an organization’s ability to detect and respond to prevalent and emerging cybersecurity threats.

Using MSSP services results in an organization not having to hire in-demand security human resources, buy, deploy, and manage security tools or keep up with dynamic security changes and shifts in the threat landscape.

Beginning with GlobalCSA

Businesses can contract GlobalCSA to free their in-house IT teams for value-driven projects. GlobalCSA is fully aware of the importance of cybersecurity in an economy and understands different security concerns that enterprises and users face. In effect, the company stands ready to offer advanced cybersecurity services for complex and near-constant cybersecurity threats.

Partnering with GlobalCSA empowers a business to design and incorporate reliable security solutions into their infrastructure to support their enterprise business strategy. The MSSP provides automation, visibility, and innovative capabilities to protect and help businesses grow securely.