SYDNEY: A CrowdStrike report reveals nearly 3 out of 4 business leaders see cybersecurity as a top priority in covid-19 recovery. Despite severe economic downturn, organizations expect increased technology budgets to support escalated digital transformation in today’s new business normal.

CrowdStrike Inc., a leader in cloud-delivered endpoint protection, today announced the release of the 2020 CrowdStrike Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) State of Cybersecurity Report, produced by independent research firm StollzNow.

Commissioned by CrowdStrike, the study surveyed 2,017 business leaders in Australia, New Zealand, India, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Japan. The study found that amongst those respondents who believe there should be more investment in remote working, the highest number (74%) list enhancement of cybersecurity measures as a priority for additional investment.

Further, despite a grim economic outlook, 65% expect technology budgets to increase.

The report indicates that many organizations have experienced digital transformation at an unprecedented pace and scale across business segments and operations, as they have quickly moved to mass remote working arrangements during COVID-19 in order to survive. In fact, 44% of business leaders surveyed said the pandemic accelerated their move to cloud solutions, while 82% say COVID-19 changed the way they interact or deliver products and services to customers.

These results indicate a strong shift and rapid investment into transformation projects that move from on-premises security solutions to next generation cloud-native solutions as organizations look to protect today’s distributed workforce.

As cybersecurity is front of mind for budget allocation, many respondents have recognized that COVID-19 has brought on a massive increase in cyber threat behavior. In fact, CrowdStrike observed an increase in eCrime activity up over 330% since the start of the year versus in 2019.

As business leaders look forward and put the initial shock of the pandemic behind them, the issues of solidifying a secure digital transformation, prioritizing and assigning budgets to appropriate and most critical areas, including cybersecurity training, and protecting new supply chains will need to be addressed.

“The COVID-19 pandemic may have had the biggest impact on the way organizations operate since the introduction of office PCs. The reaction of business leaders has been impressive, but the speed and size of change to a remote workforce led to some inevitable gaps, particularly in the cybersecurity of organizations,” said Andrew Littleproud, vice president, APJ at CrowdStrike.

“Our findings show that respondents understand these gaps and expect to address them in the recovery, going beyond ‘good enough’ security measures to ensure their employees remain secure against sophisticated threat activity regardless of where they are located. In the new business normal, it will be vital to implement solutions that can be quickly deployed at scale to detect new threats, adhere to new regulations, and leverage the cloud so they can be easily managed remotely.”

Other notable findings from the 2020 CrowdStrike APJ State of Cybersecurity Report include:

• Though organizations have changed their IT environments to accommodate remote workers, 39% of respondents have not changed their security programs as a result of COVID-19, potentially exposing their organizations to cyber risks from new and more sophisticated attacks.
• Employee education and communication are key to a successful cybersecurity strategy, yet 20% of business leaders don’t know what to do in the event of a data breach and 36% of respondents have not received communications about COVID-19 themed malware. Moving forward, 76% of APJ business leaders say they plan on additional security training in the future.
• As we look to the new normal, 67% of business leaders believe that their organizations should invest more in building a remote work environment.
• The top cybersecurity challenges expected in the next 18 months include remote workforce (54%), new regulation (49%) and costs of compliance (48%), with limited budgets (47%) and additional training (41%) ranking not far behind.