But few confident cyber budgets are being assigned, spent correctly
Nearly all (97 per cent) of Canadian businesses say their cybersecurity strategies will shift as a result of the increased digitization during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to PwC Canada's Digital Trust Insights report.
“Traditional approaches to cyber are struggling to keep up with the pace and scale of digitization and automation. And they're slowing down business strategies and impacting both the top and bottom line. So it's really not surprising that nearly all Canadian executives say their cybersecurity strategies will shift as a result of COVID-19,” said Saj Nair, partner and national leader for cybersecurity, privacy & financial crime at PwC Canada.
More than half (56 per cent) expect to increase their cyber budgets. However, just 34 per cent are really confident their cyber budgets are being assigned and spent correctly, found the survey of more than 3,000 business and technology executives around the world.
“As organizations digitize, getting the most value out of every cyber dollar spent will become even more critical, not just because of our current economic climate, but also because every new digital process can become a vulnerability for cyberattack,” according to PwC Management Services.
Digital changes
The top three cybersecurity approaches that Canadian organizations have implemented, and are currently realizing the most benefits from, are security orchestration and automation (19 per cent), modern identity and access management (17 per cent) and integrated cloud and network security (17 per cent).
Fifty-seven per cent of Canadian executives plan to increase resilience testing to make sure, if a disruptive cyber event occurs, their critical business functions will stay up and running.
In the next year, 42 per cent of Canadian respondents plan to add full-time cybersecurity personnel to their organization, and 94 per cent use or plan to use managed services.
Attacks on web applications rose by 800 per cent in the first six months of 2020 compared to the same period last year, according to a report from CDN and cloud security provider CDNetworks released in November.
Randstad suggests the following tech-based solutions to keep at-home working setup secure:
- Set up two-factor authentication
- Regulate VPN use
- Avoid public networks
- Only use company security-approved devices
- Ask employees to secure their router
Previously, the federal government invested $160,000 in a Montreal-based engineering firm to develop a model that will help protect Canadian companies from cyber-attacks, providing security to the cyber systems that underpin Canada's energy infrastructure.
