83% of businesses have changed their cybersecurity strategy in the last six months

October 20, 2020

More than four-fifths of larger businesses have altered their cybersecurity approach in the last six months due to Covid-19, according to new research.

Having interviewed 215 IT leaders in the US, CensusWide and Centrify found that the bigger a company is, the more effort they have put into securing remote access to critical infrastructure to IT admin teams, according to a report in Forbes.

The researchers found that 83% of bigger organisations had changed their cybersecurity approach in the last six months.

In smaller organisations with between ten and49 employees, 60% adjusted their cloud security postures as a result of distributed workforces.

In businesses with over 500 employees, 73% accelerated their cloud migration plans to support the shift to remote working across their organizations due to the pandemic and 81% of enterprises did the same for their digitalisation efforts.

The research adds to a growing body of research into how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected the cybersecurity sector.

For instance, recent research from Thycotic found that most boards are looking to invest more into their digital defences due to the growing threat of hack attacks and other forms of digital scams, which have risen during the coronavirus outbreak.

The cybersecurity company had polled 908 senior IT security decision makers. It found that 58% plan to grow their security budget in the next 12 months, with 91% agreeing that their board adequately supports them with investment.

But while the interest in investing in new digital defences has grown during the health crisis, it seems as if investment into the actual companies slowed down in the first half of 2020, according to FinTech Global’s research.

In total, the ventures in the sector raised $2.2bn between January and June, which is not even half of the $4.7bn injected into the industry in 2019. Moreover, we saw the sector only raise $700m in the second quarter, representing a 60% decline from the first three months of 2020.