Cybersecurity Outflanks Inflation, Talent, Logistics in Business Worries: Rackspace Research -

Nearly six in 10 IT leaders in a new study view cybersecurity as their top business concern, ranking it higher than inflation, retaining talent and supply chain/logistics management.

Less than half of respondents (43%) believe their critical data and assets are protected from cyber threats despite increased cybersecurity investments by their organizations, greater board visibility and increased collaboration between the security team and the C-suite, Rackspace said in its new survey of 1,420 IT professionals worldwide.

Threat Preparedness Lacking

The San Antonio, Texas-based, multi-cloud technology services specialist said that a “large majority” of the survey respondents report being either unprepared or only “somewhat prepared” to respond to major threats, such as identifying and mitigating threats and areas of concern (62%), recovering from cyberattacks (61%) or preventing lapses and breaches (63%).

Cloud native security is where organizations are most likely to rely on an outside partner, such as a managed security service provider, for expertise.

Cybersecurity Budgets Increasing

Here are more of the survey’s findings:

The top three cybersecurity challenges their organization is facing: migrating and operating apps (45%); shortage of workers with cybersecurity skills (39%); lack of visibility of vulnerabilities across all infrastructure (38%).

70% of survey respondents report that their cybersecurity budgets have increased over the past three years.

The leading recipients of new investment are cloud native security (59%), data security (50%), consultative security services (44%) and application security (41%).

Investments align closely with the areas where organizations perceive their greatest concentration of threats, led by network security (58%), closely followed by web application attacks (53%) and cloud architecture attacks (50%).

70% of respondents said there has been an increase in board visibility for cybersecurity over the past five years, while 69% cite better collaboration between the security team and members of the C-suite.

Only 13% of respondents said there were significant communications gaps between the security team and C-suite, while 69% of IT executives view their counterparts in the C-suite as advocates for their concerns.

Gary Alterson, vice president of Security Solutions at Rackspace, put the survey results into perspective:

“We are seeing a major shift in how organizations are allocating resources to address cyberthreats, even as budgets increase. The cloud brings with it a new array of security challenges that require new expertise, and often reliance on external partners who can help implement cloud native security tools, automate security, provide cloud native application protection, offer container security solutions and other capabilities.”