Large organizations have significantly strengthened their cyber workforce in 2024, according to cyber consultancy Wavestone.
In its Cyber Benchmark 2024 report, Wavestone found that, on average, companies with over $1bn in revenues have one expert dedicated to cybersecurity for 1086 employees.
In 2023, the same organizations had one cyber professional for 1285 employees - a 15% increase.
The best in class are financial businesses, which boast an average of one cyber expert per 267 employees, while industrial groups have an average of one cyber expert for 1390 employees.
Speaking to Infosecurity, Gerome Billois, a Wavestone partner in charge of cybersecurity and digital trust, attributed the rise to efforts conducted by large groups over several years to bolster their cyber defenses.
In the report, a person who dedicates half of their time to conducting cybersecurity missions is considered a cybersecurity expert and the number of employees considered is limited to staff members with regular access to the organization's IT systems.
Cyber Maturity Stabilizes at 53%. The report, published on June 26, also found that the overall maturity level of surveyed organizations has reached 53%, a one percentage point increase from 2023.
He said that, in previous years, large groups' leadership teams were mobilized to implement basic cybersecurity measures, generalizing adoption of endpoint detection and response solutions and multifactor authentication and securing identity access systems like Microsoft Active Directory.
He also noted that, while 53% can still appear as a low maturity level, some analyzed companies have reached record-high 80-90% of cyber maturity levels.
Budgets have also stabilized, representing an average of 6.6% of the IT budget across all sectors.
The emphasis on improving their data security posture, on the other hand, is mainly driven by the growing challenges of artificial intelligence, the report noted.
The analyzed companies are still struggling in some areas.
These include third-party security, where organizations show average maturity levels of 48.9%, and industrial system security, at 39.9%. Wavestone's Cyber Benchmark is an annual report based on a continuous assessment of over 150 companies across 200 security measures divided into 16 categories.
The selected measures are based on the US National Institute of Standards and Technology's Cybersecurity Framework and the ISO 27001 standard.
This Cyber News was published on www.infosecurity-magazine.com. Publication date: Tue, 02 Jul 2024 11:43:06 +0000