Companies in Poland during the pandemic appreciate the importance of cyber security

The increase in remote working is the most visible change that has occurred in businesses as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a survey conducted by ARC Market and Opinion on behalf of Fortinet, one of the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic is that the boards of enterprises have paid more attention to and prioritized cyber security issues.

This is no longer, in their understanding, an area that remains solely within the competence of IT departments, but a strategic element of the functioning of the company. – After all, it is known that as a result of a hacker attack, company’s operations can be paralyzed, and financial losses can be counted in hundreds of thousands of zlotys – says Jolanta Malak, Director Fortinet in Poland. – To this must be added the image issues, associated with the loss of confidence of customers, and legal issues, resulting from eg. from the regulations on personal data protection.

Why this increased interest in cyber security? As many as 70% of respondents to Fortinet’s survey emphasize that new IT security risks have emerged in the wake of the pandemic, and 73% admitted that the era of remote working is also paying more attention to pre-existing threats. As a result, cyber security was recognized as one of the key elements of a company’s operations, and thus included in business continuity planning (60% of indications).

High-level security?

In this context, it is worth noting that as many as 87% of respondents considered the state of IT security in their companies as satisfactory. The vast majority, 68%, of those surveyed, when asked what they would have done differently in the past 6 months with their current knowledge, said they would not have done anything differently. Others pointed to such areas as the need to invest in hardware or training and the purchase of additional protection software.

According to Jolanta Malak, such an attitude may be partly caused by a false sense of security. – Today’s cyber-attacks are as advanced as ever and you should not lose vigilance or fall into the belief that everything is under control, especially since it takes on average 200 days from the time of a security breach to its detection, and then still more than two months to contain the situation (Cost of a Data Breach Report, 2020, Ponemon Institute) – emphasizes the director of Fortinet.

Waiting for normality

Despite the fact that more than half of respondents (55%) would like to return to desktop work after the end of the pandemic, it turns out that according to 69% of respondents, it is not issues related to cyber security that will determine whether the company will remain in the remote working model. In addition, in more than half of the companies, the situation related to the pandemic did not accelerate such business processes as. moving to the cloud. – It is quite surprising, because cloud applications significantly improve remote working, allow you to share documents and speed up business processes. As can be seen, however, this was not a reason that would convince enterprises to move to cloud solutions – says Jolanta Malak.

In contrast, 79% of respondents admitted that their company has not invested and does not intend to invest in public cloud application security in the future. Such an attitude may result either from trust in public cloud solution providers, or from lack of awareness that a cloud user may introduce additional security measures on their own .