“Organizations get bogged down in the progress of cyber security.

Companies all over the world are stuck in their progress in the field of cyber security. In the Benelux, Belgium and the Netherlands score below the global average. That’s what a new report from NTT Security says. The research was conducted by Jigsaw Research among 2,256 senior non-IT decision makers in various countries. Of these, 101 came from the Benelux.

NTT Security investigated the reactions to good and bad applications in cyber security. Good applications yielded positive scores, bad applications yielded negative scores. In 2019, the average score was +3, the same as in 2018. This means that there are almost as many good as bad applications. In Belgium the score was +1, in the Netherlands it was 0. India scored the best.

The report gives several reasons for the fact that the Benelux is lagging behind in the field of cyber security. For example, less than half of the respondents here consider their critical data to be completely safe. That percentage was 45 percent, the same as in 2018. More than a third would rather pay ransom to a hacker than invest in security. The same percentage would rather pay a hacker than be fined for not complying with the data protection regulations. These figures are also the same as those from 2018.

However, 81% say that they think it is important to comply with the regulations. However, 10% do not know what rules the company has to comply with. Moreover, only 24 percent think that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) applies to them. This is despite the fact that the GDPR applies to every company that works with customers in a Member State of the European Union.

Too little budget

According to the report, there is too little budget for security to deal with the increasing threat of cyber attacks. For example, the operational budget for security dropped to 15 percent and the percentage of IT budgets reserved for security only slightly increased to 14 percent.

Furthermore, organisations do not act proactively when it comes to internal policy implementation and processes. For example, 50 percent have a formal information security policy and 43 percent have an incident response plan. That is an increase of 1% compared to the previous year. In addition, 40 percent think that cyber security is a problem for the IT department and not for the entire organisation.