Growing losses from cyber incidents: Global firms planning to increase cybersecurity budgets

ISLAMABAD: A global Cybersecurity Company Friday disclosed that the companies across the globe including Pakistani undertakings are planning to increase their investments in information security against the background of growing financial losses from cyber incidents.

According to latest “IT Security Economics” report by Kaspersky released on Friday, companies plan to increase their IT security budgets by up to 9 percent. The median cybersecurity budgets for large enterprises were $5.7 million with $41.8 million allocated for IT generally, while SMBs invested $0.2 million in IT security from a median IT budget of $1.6 million.

Kaspersky IT Security Economics is an annual report that unpicks the changes in budgets, breaches and business challenges affecting IT Security decision makers. It is based on interviews with IT and IT security professionals working in organizations of various sizes and industries. The survey was conducted across 27 countries in Europe, the Middle East, Turkiye, the Africa region, Latin and North America and Asia-Pacific region including Pakistan.

Large enterprises experienced an average of 12 incidents this year, spending $6.2 million to recover from them — 1.1 times higher than the budget allocated for IT security overall. While these enterprises are often better equipped to detect incidents quickly, the time required to fully respond and mitigate these threats can span for hours, underscoring the challenge of managing widespread, complex IT environments.

As for SMBs, these organizations experienced an average of 16 incidents this year, while spending $0.3 million for remediation, which is 1.5 times higher than their overall IT Security budget. SMBs are the most disproportionately affected group in terms of budgetary impact.

In Pakistan organizations of all sizes reported to have experienced on average 11 incidents within a year.

“The growth in budget is driven by at least three key factors including the constant growth in the complexity of cybersecurity threats, increasing concerns from governments regarding digital sovereignty leads to the emergence of new regulations and regulatory requirements and, as a result, increased expenses and the constant increase in salary expectations for professionals in various cybersecurity fields,” comments Veniamin Levtsov, Vice President, Center of Corporate Business Expertise at Kaspersky, the report added.

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