62 percent of organizations suffer unplanned downtime every month

Over half of organizations say they have suffered a data breach in the past two years, an increase from 49 percent in 2022 and 39 percent in 2021.

In addition, a new report from Splunk shows 62 percent of respondents report that their business-critical applications have suffered from unplanned downtime due to a cybersecurity incident on at least a monthly basis, an increase from 54 percent in 2022.

The mean number of outages an organization faces is 22 per year and the cost of this downtime consumes roughly 2.7 percent of annual revenue. 39 percent of respondents say cybersecurity incidents have directly harmed their competitive position, and 31 percent say cybersecurity incidents have reduced shareholder value.

The report also finds that bad actors are going unnoticed on corporate networks for extended periods of time. On average respondents report that more than two months go by from when a bad actor gains access to the enterprise when appropriate parties become aware of it.

Security teams are spending more though with 95 percent of the respondents saying their security budgets will increase over the next two years. In addition 81 percent of organizations say they are converging aspects of their security and IT operations together. Respondents believe that this convergence will help with the overall visibility of risks in their environment (58 percent) and that they will see improved cooperation in threat identification and response processes (55 percent).

There’s increased focus on protecting the supply chain too with 95 percent of respondents saying they have increased their focus on third-party risk assessments. Also 91 percent of respondents agree that better capture and analysis of detection data is one of the most effective tools to prevent successful ransomware attacks.

"In the organizations we've worked with, resilience has been strongest with a collaborative approach in everything, from software development and infrastructure monitoring to business continuity planning," says Ryan Kovar, distinguished security strategist at Splunk. "This approach brings everyone to the table, including security leaders with IT and business leaders, so they all can focus on protecting the organization."

You can get the full report on the Splunk site.

Image Credit: Tang Yan Song/Shutterstock