Companies are planning to increase their investments in information security against the background of growing financial losses from cyber incidents.
This trend was revealed in the recent Kaspersky’s IT Security Economics report, which unpicks the changes in budgets, breaches and business challenges affecting IT Security decision makers. It is based on interviews with IT and IT security professionals working in organisations of various sizes and industries. The survey was conducted across 27 countries in Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East, Turkiye and Africa region (including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, South Africa, Turkiye, the UAE), Latin and North America.
According to the study, companies plan to increase their IT security budgets by up to 9%. The median cybersecurity budgets for large enterprises were $5,7-million with $41,8-million allocated for IT generally, while SMBs invested $200 000 in IT security from a median IT budget of $1,6-million.
Possible reasons for the increased investment can be found in the analysis of financial losses from cyber incidents. Large enterprises experienced an average of 12 incidents this year, spending $6,2-million to recover from them — 1,1-times higher than the budget allocated for IT security overall.
Despite the greater resources and advanced security infrastructures, the sheer scale and complexity of large enterprise organisations make them more susceptible to costly breaches.
While these enterprises are often better equipped to detect incidents quickly, the time required to fully respond and mitigate these threats can span for hours, underscoring the challenge of managing widespread, complex IT environments.
As for SMBs, these organisations experienced an average of 16 incidents this year, while spending $300 000 for remediation, which is 1,5-times higher than their overall IT Security budget.
SMBs are the most disproportionately affected group in terms of budgetary impact. They often lack robust cybersecurity policies and procedures, which leaves them vulnerable to incidents involving employees, public cloud misconfigurations, and high-level permissions.
In South Africa organiations of all sizes reported to have experienced on average 19 incidents within a year.
“The data illustrates the continuation of the current trend of increasing cybersecurity spending across all market segments,” comments Veniamin Levtsov, vice-president: Centre of Corporate Business Expertise at Kaspersky. “This growth is driven by at least three key factors.
“Firstly, and obviously, the constant growth in the complexity of cybersecurity threats forces companies to adopt more advanced solutions to enhance the detection of attack traces and automate responses.
“Secondly, increasing concerns from governments regarding digital sovereignty leads to the emergence of new regulations and regulatory requirements and, as a result, increased expenses.
“The third factor influencing the growth of cybersecurity budgets and costs is the constant increase in salary expectations for professionals in various cybersecurity fields.”