Indian IT managers facing budget crunch for cybersecurity

Mumbai:  Most Indian IT managers are struggling to respond to cybersecurity due to severe budget crunch, lack of expertise and up to date technology, a new survey said on Monday.

Over 80 per cent Indian IT managers said their organisation's cybersecurity budget - including people/technology is below what it needs to be, said the survey by global cybersecurity major Sophos.

Indian IT managers reported that 32 per cent of their team's time is spent managing security, on average, yet only eight per cent believe they have a skilled team in place to properly detect, investigate and respond to cybersecurity incidents. 

"Staying on top of where threats are coming from takes dedicated expertise, but IT managers often have a hard time finding the right talent or don't have a proper security system in place that allows them to respond quickly and efficiently to attacks," Chester Wisniewski, principal research scientist, Sophos, said in a statement. 

"If organizations can adopt a security system with products that work together to share intelligence and automatically react to threats, then IT security teams can avoid the trap of perpetually catching up after yesterday's attack and better defend against what's going to happen tomorrow," Wisniewski added. 

The survey, titled "The Impossible Puzzle of Cybersecurity", revealed IT managers are inundated with cyberattacks coming from all directions and are struggling to keep up.

The survey polled 3,100 IT decision makers from mid-sized businesses in India, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, the UK, France, Germany, Australia, Japan, South Africa and the US.

Nearly 90 per cent IT managers agreed that staying up to date with cybersecurity technology is a challenge for their organisation. The survey was conducted in December 2018 and January 2019.