Navigating cybersecurity investments: trends, threats, and resilience
Cybersecurity has gained prominence due to increased remote working and online transactions, though it’s been relevant for decades. The 1990s email virus outbreaks and hacking incidents first highlighted its significance. With increased cloud adoption and people working from home, cyber threats have grown. Spending on cybersecurity focuses on areas like firewalls, email protection, and cloud-based security, aiming for resilience against intellectual property theft and fraud, even in tough economic times.
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Jeremy Gleeson: So, cybersecurity is a critical issue that has come increasingly under the spotlight as more people work from home and more transactions are conducted online. But, you know, cybersecurity has also been around for many years, if not decades. I think we’re all aware of the issues that were seen in the 1990s and the early 2000s as a result of computer viruses and the submission of malicious code in emails which caused companies around the world and consumers problems. Or even the types of activity that took place in films such as War Games where hackers could break into highly secure systems and potentially do things that you didn’t really want them to be doing.
So, in recent years, cybersecurity specialists have been talking about, or citing, an unprecedented demand as more companies move to cloud-based computing. With more people working from home, and networks becoming more open and proliferating across the internet, it’s also increased the opportunity for the bad guys to exploit opportunities from which they could arguably profit from.
So, we expect spending around cybersecurity to continue. Areas that are benefiting from the increased budget applied to cybersecurity are firewalls, email protection, cloud-based security, and vulnerability management. These are all important aspects to cybersecurity.
And an important aspect of cybersecurity spending is its resilience. So, even in a tougher economic environment, the bad guys don’t ease up on their attempts to steal intellectual property or to defraud customers. So, spending can’t just be stopped or deferred, like it can be for other areas such as advertising.
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