ITWeb ran a survey in June on cybersecurity to gain a better understanding of how SA businesses are managing their cybersecurity posture.

Survey sponsor MTN Business wanted to find out where local companies are going for information about cybersecurity best practice, as well as the challenges they face.

A total of 180 valid responses were captured, with 59% of respondents being at executive or middle management level. While 42% of respondents came from the IT sector, there was a good spread of respondents across all sectors.

Here are some of the key findings:

Just over half (59%) of all survey respondents said their IT manager or CTO was primarily responsible for making cybersecurity purchasing decisions, while a third (31%) said their CEO or executive leadership made those decisions. 6% of respondent companies had a procurement team.
The majority of respondents (86%) were confident that their organisation could detect and respond to a cyberattack within 24 hours.
The three top sources of information or updates about cybersecurity best practices were cited as: internal IT teams (63%); security vendors (62%); and online forums or communities (62%).
The primary cybersecurity challenge faced by respondent organisations was phishing attacks (65%) followed by compliance with regulations (47%) and data breaches (44%).
Respondent organisations say they manage access to their network and applications via: Multi-factor authentication (MFA) (77%), Traditional VPN (54%) and Single sign-on (SSO) (44%).
Primary concerns when considering the adoption of new security services and tools were ranked as follows:
- Integration with existing systems (73%)
- Cost of deployment and maintenance (68%)
- Implementation complexity (62%)
- User experience and productivity impact (55%)
- Scalability and flexibility (53%).
Asked which cybersecurity capabilities they planned to invest in over the next 12 months, respondents cited threat detection and response (57%), cloud security (56%), identity and access management (52%), employee training and awareness (50%) and compliance and audit tools (48%).
The top three ways in which respondents expected their cybersecurity needs to change as their business grows were: need for more automation (38%), increase in complexity and risk (32%); and a greater focus on compliance (21%).

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