For Indian business leaders, upskilling workforce biggest cybersecurity challenge: Microsoft

As companies strive to keep cybersecurity issues at bay with employees working from home, nearly 50% of business leaders in India find upskilling their workforce on new solutions to be the biggest challenge for IT security teams, a study said. 

The report was released by technology giant Microsoft, which surveyed 800 business leaders of companies with more than 500 employees across India, Germany, the UK and the US. 

According to 62% of India business leaders, the pandemic has changed security challenges, with 43% prioritising investments in cloud security through the calendar year, the report showed.

In fact, at 70%, a majority of Indian leaders had plans to accelerate the deployment of zero trust capabilities to reduce risk exposure. With zero trust security, no person from inside or outside a network is trusted by default -- everyone must undergo a verification process to get access to the network. 

“The shift to remote work is fundamentally changing security architecture by focusing on identities over perimeter security via zero trust strategies,” the report said.

While 51% of business leaders globally are speeding up deployment of zero trust capabilities, 94% of companies report that they are already in the process of deploying it.

Read: IT managers in India struggle to convince senior executives about cloud security investment: Sophos 

The pandemic has also had direct implications on cybersecurity budgets and staffing, the report said, with 33% of business leaders in India reporting a 25% budget increase for security. More than half of those surveyed said they would hire additional security professionals in their security team.

“In response to Covid-19, more than 80% of companies added security jobs. While 58% of companies reported an increase in security budgets globally, 65% reported an increase in compliance budgets,” it said.

Investments towards data and information security was a priority for 37% of the total respondents.

The development comes at a time when 90% of businesses globally have been impacted by phishing attacks. At 36%, the attacks were more successful in organisations that had on-premise resources compared to those that used cloud-based solutions.