Many senior cybersecurity professionals in UK businesses struggle with feelings of helplessness and professional despair, new research by Green Raven indicates, with these emotions impacting their personal lives.
This negativity results from practitioners’ anticipation of eventual, inevitable failure to protect their organisation.
Companies are therefore looking for better and more precise understanding of threats so they can target budget and defences where they are needed, and have high hopes for new, AI-based tools.
The research, commissioned by Green Raven and conducted by research specialist Censuswide, comprised a quantitative survey of 200 cybersecurity professionals with responsibility for cybersecurity, cybersecurity teams and associated budgets in organisations of over 1,000 employees.
The results showed that 70 percent of them admit to feelings of professional despair/helplessness at the inexorable rise in cyber losses, and 59 percent of respondents admit these feelings have a negative impact on their personal lives and/or mental health.
It also revealed that almost 70 percent are under pressure from senior management to better justify their next annual cybersecurity budget against the actual risks and threats faced by their organisation.
The survey showed that fewer than half of respondents believe their organisation is investing sufficiently in cybersecurity, despite nearly 90 percent of respondents reporting that their cybersecurity budgets are increasing.
And while most respondents recognise that the ‘gold standard’ process for risk and compliance management comprises the four steps of identification, assessment, treatment, and monitoring; only three-quarters of respondents say their organisation executes all four steps.
The research also showed that almost four in every five respondents expect that new, AI-enhanced tools will give them an advantage over threat actors in the form of better cyber threat intelligence which tells them from where a likely attack will come or land.
Interpreting the research, Morten Mjels, CEO of Green Raven Limited, commented: “Respondents are still happy to say that current cybersecurity strategies are ‘sustainable’ - when their own observations clearly indicate otherwise.
“They also believe the defences in which they are responsible for investing money in will ultimately fail to protect their organisation and expect to be held responsible when the big breach comes,” he observed.
“Third, it’s uncomfortable to learn that a full quarter of respondents recognise that they aren’t rigorously applying the gold standard, four-step process to risk and compliance management.
“This reveals that many practitioners might misunderstand the gold standard process, and whether existing solutions and practices have contributed to a watering-down of that process that practitioners haven’t noticed happening,” he said.
“Finally, it’s clear that practitioners are pinning a great deal of expectation on new or emerging AI-based solutions to tilt the field back in their favour,” he concluded.
Helping to change the ‘ever higher walls/deeper moats’ approach to cybersecurity, Darkscope offers predictive cyber threat intelligence for enterprises, with an AI-powered portfolio of solutions that predicts cyberattacks before they take place.
This enables organisations to regain control of their overall cybersecurity expenditure, as well as lowering their vulnerability to a successful breach.
