A cyber security survey being conducted in partnership with Arctic Wolf has gone live on ITWeb. The aim of the survey is to examine the current status of the South African cyber security market.

Jason Oehley, the regional sales manager for South Africa at Arctic Wolf, says: “Ideally, we’d like to gain an understanding of the South African market, where people are on their security transformation journey, what their biggest challenges are and where we can help.”

He says there are three fundamental things that he is hoping to achieve with the survey: “As we’re relatively new to the South African market, we’d like to gain insight into what customers are experiencing in terms of security challenges and what’s happening generally on the security front locally. Naturally we want to create awareness around our presence in South Africa. And finally, we’d like to get more clarity on where we can assist respondents by addressing some of the challenges they’re facing.”

A recent global survey by Arctic Wolf showed that one in five businesses (21%) are not planning to increase their cyber security budget in 2023. Oehley says: “Bearing in mind the number of cyber attacks that have been seen over the past year, we’re hoping that at least 25% of South African organisations will have increased their security budgets. We also want to uncover whether they need assistance to prioritise and work with their existing tools.”

“We’re seeing an even greater requirement for security despite not seeing budget allocations tracking with that. Our survey showed that the fear of a cloud-based data breach is the top concern for IT decision-makers, with nearly half (48%) of respondents ranking it as the top area of concern. We want to find out what it is that’s keeping people employed in local cyber security awake at night.

“Our global survey also uncovered that if an organisation was to experience a breach, only 25% would disclose it to their customers, and just over half (52%) would disclose it to their own executive team. We’re keen to discover if local organisations believe breach reporting should be mandated.”

He concludes: “Often organisations think that the measures they have in place are sufficient to keep them compliant with legislation such as POPIA, for example, but sometimes they aren’t. And that can have an impact on the business from an insurance perspective, not just from a cyber security standpoint. On the whole, it’ll be interesting to see whether the local cyber security market aligns with the global statistics.”

In this survey, we will examine, among other things:

What are your business’s top areas of concern going into 2023?
Which of the following types of cyber attacks are you most concerned that your business will face in 2023?
Should organisations be legally required to disclose a cyber security incident or data breach?

We hope you’ll be able set aside a few minutes of your time to participate in the survey, and stand a chance to win a Takealot voucher to the value of R3 000. The detailed results of the survey, and the prize winner, will be published on ITWeb.

To play your role in compiling this cyber security trends report, click on the link below:

https://www.itweb.co.za/survey/JWPmxVEMK4qQY85e

Uncovering SA’s cyber security woes