Global Survey by Check Point Software Reveals Protecting Teleworkers and Cloud Deployments to be Top Challenges for Next Two Years. Majority of companies believe security will not return to standards before pandemic.
Based in California, Check Point Software is one of the world's leading providers of cybersecurity solutions. Its new survey was conducted among 613 IT security professionals worldwide. Its results show the top cybersecurity priorities and challenges for businesses through 2023. She highlights security strategy changes forced by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. More than half of respondents said their business is experiencing more attacks and threats today than at the start of 2020. The majority of them believe that their approach to security will not return to what it was before the pandemic : only one in five say their security operations have returned to the previous stage. The main findings of the survey are as follows : by 2021, the safety of teleworkers is the main challenge, monitoring the prevention of phishing and social engineering attacks, securing remote access, and protection of applications and infrastructure in the cloud (39 %). The main priorities until 2023 are securing teleworking, security of workstations and mobiles, and the security of public clouds and multi-clouds, well before the security of connected objects and messaging.
Change of strategy
Ninety-five percent of respondents said their strategies changed in the second half of 2020, the most important being to enable large-scale teleworking. Just over a quarter said they accelerated existing security projects in 2020, which shows that for the majority of them, their response to the pandemic involved an unplanned reinvention of their business model.The new normal is here to stay: around half of those surveyed believe their approach to safety will not revert to standards before the pandemic. While 29% said they expect a return to pre-pandemic conditions at some point in the future, only 20% believe that their situation is now back to what it was before.
“The survey shows that a majority of businesses don't expect their current security issues and priorities to change much over the next two years. For many, the rapid changes they have made to their networks and security infrastructures in response to the pandemic will be permanent "explains Michaël Techer, Country Manager France chez Check Point Software. " At the same time, cyber attacks and threats increase, because hackers try to take advantage of these changes. Dealing with the impact of the pandemic on business operations and ensuring that they can continue to operate as efficiently and safely as possible will be the biggest recurring challenge for most businesses.. »
Fill gaps
To block growing volumes of cyber attacks and threats, companies must prioritize addressing security gaps in their new distributed networks, from the PCs of employees at home and of the employees themselves to the Datacenter. To help evolve security strategies, Check Point Software considers preventive vaccination preferable to treatment and, in cybersecurity, real-time prevention is the key to network protection, employees and data against attacks and threats Companies must review and verify their level of security and the suitability of their network infrastructures, their devices, their processes, compliance of mobile devices and connected PCs, connected objects, etc. The increased use of the cloud requires an increased level of security, in particular for workload security technologies, containers and serverless applications in multi-cloud and hybrid environments Given the many rapid changes in enterprise infrastructure, security efficiency will increase dramatically through unified administration and better visibility into the risks of their entire security architecture.
