The state of cybersecurity resilience 2021

The state of cybersecurity resilience now

In our annual survey among 4,744 global respondents around the current state of cybersecurity resilience, we found 85% of CISOs agree or strongly agree that the cybersecurity strategy is developed with business objectives, such as growth or market share, in mind. Yet, 81%, also said that “staying ahead of attackers is a constant battle and the cost is unsustainable” compared with 69% in 2020.

Cyber attacks are up: Large UK organisations each faced an average of 885 attempted cyberattacks – more than triple the global average of 270 . Third-party risk continues to dominate: indirect attacks through the supply chain have increased by 26% in the UK, accounting for 64% of breaches.

Despite soaring attempted attacks, UK organisations saw fewer successful breaches than the previous year – 17 compared to 30. This is also significantly lower than the global average of 29 successful breaches. “UK organisations have shown incredible strength and resilience despite the rising numbers of attacks.” Giovanni Cozzolino, Security Lead for Accenture in the UK.

Security investment continues to rise: More than 80% of our survey respondents say their budgets have increased in the last year. In the UK over a quarter of our respondents indicated those budgets had increased by more than 10%.

Cloud still has a complex relationship with security: Despite most UK respondents believing in secure cloud, 29% say security is not part of the cloud discussion from the outset and they’re trying to catch up. Reasons preventing take-up of the cloud revolve around security issues: about one-third of all respondents say poor governance and compliance is a problem, that cloud security is too complex and that they do not have the internal skills to structure a proper cloud security framework.

Championing cybersecurity

This year, we identified four levels of cyber resilience including an elite group of Cyber Champions—organisations that excel at cyber resilience, but also align with the business strategy to achieve better business outcomes.

We also continued to explore how winning organisations tackle cyber resilience, evaluating their responses based on the following performance criteria: they stop more attacks, find and fix breaches faster and reduce breach impact.

Key measures of cyber resilience

Click on the arrows to explore how organisations perform.

How to be a Cyber Champion

Cyber Champions demonstrate that, with the right balance of alignment between business strategy and cybersecurity, organisations can achieve strong business performance while maintaining superior cyber resilience. Cyber Champions:

• Are among the top 30% in at least three of the four cyber resilience criteria.
• Experience fewer successful breaches – 8 percentage points lower than Business Blockers and 36 percentage points lower than Cyber Risk Takers.
• Have speedier detection and remediation response times.
• Better protect themselves from loss of data—only 4% of Cyber Champions lose more than 500,000 records—6.5X less than Cyber Risk Takers.

To be more like Cyber Champions:

Organisations that focus solely on business objectives are missing out on the benefits of cyber resilience. By aligning their cybersecurity efforts with the business strategy, organisations can not only achieve better business outcomes, but also seize the advantage in the race to cyber resilience.

The authors would like to thank Edward Blomquist, Julia Malinska, Anna Marszalik, Eileen Moynihan, Vincenzo Palermo and Ann Vander Hijde for their contributions to this report.