Gulf Business Machines (GBM)’s latest security survey unveiled at GISEC 2016, has revealed that nearly 50 percent of GCC executives lack confidence in their organisations in having the right tools to predict and prevent cyber-attacks.
The fifth edition of the annual GBM Security Study polled over 700 executives and IT professionals based in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain and Kuwait.
Corporate investment in IT security is a major focus of the GBM survey, and despite internal and external threats to organisations, 71 percent of executives confirmed that their IT security budgets will either stay the same or decrease in 2016.
Hani Nofal, Vice President of Networks, Security and Mobility said, “Security is no longer strictly an IT function but companies across the region increasingly understand that this is a boardroom and organisational conversation.”
“That said, the survey has revealed that there is still lack of confidence in the tools to predict and prevent cyber-attacks and there is more work to be done across the GCC in terms of security strategy and awareness. While IT security budgets are getting more management focus from 29 percent of organisations, our survey has shown that nearly 70 percent of enterprises and SME’s don’t outsource their security operations. Organisations need to adopt integrated security architecture with intelligence feeds from internal and external resources to help them to predict and prevent cyber-attacks,” added Nofal.
Niraj Mathur, Security Practice Manager, GBM, said, “Our focus has been to help customers achieve their objectives, which is more on an end-to-end approach towards security. And build models and frameworks for them, which can help them move up the maturity level as well. There are different levels of maturity, which different clients need to achieve. Right now, the focus is on being as predictive as possible for organisations to help anticipate and prevent attacks. GBM’s security survey aims to do that.”
According to Mathur, the focus on security has to come from the top management of an organisation. Security has become a huge game-changer for most organisations, however, there still needs to be more emphasis, he added.
