77% of organizations in India experienced downtime during peak festive season

The Impact of COVID-19 findings, revealing the imminent need for organizations to prioritize and strengthen their cybersecurity architecture. The findings brought to light that during the past 18 months, 81% of global organizations experienced increased cyber threats, with 77% of the organizations in India experiencing downtime due to a cyber incident during a peak festive season.

Further, while the top three most threatening cyber risks that were detected are malware attacks (47%), data breaches (43%), ransomware and cloud jacking (33% each), over 30% of the IT professionals also experienced vulnerabilities in their ‘Internet of Things’ devices. During these peak periods, 91% of them find maintaining a fully staffed security team/SOC even more challenging as with the adoption of a hybrid work model, 59% of them expect half or more of their organizations’ workforce to be remote in some capacity.

It is imperative that all business of scale evaluate and prioritize security technology to keep them protected, especially during peak seasons like the holidays and traditional approaches are no longer enough – 94% want their organization to improve its overall cyber readiness – and businesses need an integrated security architecture and always on approach to prevent, protect and react to the threats of today.

As the holiday and festive season in India has already commenced, 91% of the IT professionals anticipate a moderate or even substantial impact by increased demand for their products and services. Most organizations have invested in cloud security (82%), advanced threat protection (66%), the security operations center (54%), mobile security (48%) and endpoint security (48%). Cyberattacks tend to skyrocket in India during the holiday season as we tend to spend more time online and often let our guard down.

Taking advantage of this, bad actors adopt newer techniques and sophisticated means to target businesses when they’re most vulnerable,” said Venkat Krishnapur, vice-president of engineering and managing director, McAfee Enterprise, India. “The problem is further exacerbated with employees using the same devices for personal and office work exposing critical networks and thus, with an eye to stay ahead of criminals, organizations need to ramp up their cybersecurity readiness and undertake adequate security measures.