New data suggests that security experts struggle to keep pace with AI threats. This is in light of 90% of those recently polled reporting at least one security incident in the past year.
From a survey of 300 senior security professionals, the findings highlight that the vast majority of businesses are struggling to adapt and scale their security operations in the face of talent shortages and new threats from AI. Data suggests that the risk level could be set to increase.
The research has been released by enterprise CMS Storyblok. To gather the data for analysis, Storyblok surveyed 300 senior security professionals in leadership or decision-making roles at medium to large-scale companies. The findings underline the challenges businesses now face in continuing to grow their operations while countering new security threats.
Talent shortage to address cyber threats?
When asked to rank how they expected AI to impact company security practices in the coming year, 65% of those polled indicated they needed to upgrade security and threat monitoring. After this, 54% stated how identity and access management would become more complex. Moreover, 50% believe stronger data protection and privacy controls are required.
However, meeting these demands is unlikely to be straightforward, with 50% responding that talent and skills shortages were a major barrier to improving security, followed by the complexity of legacy tech systems (46%), regulatory uncertainty (45%) and budget limitations (42%).
Website security remains a key area of concern. Only 49% of businesses say they were ‘fully prepared’ for a security incident and 39% reported a security issue impacting their content strategy in the past year. 62% cited data encryption and privacy as an area which needs to be prioritized for future website security investment, followed by user authentication and control (56%), and AI powered security tools (51%).
Watch out for human error from the inside
The top three security threats identified by businesses were threats from hackers and malware (54%), employee human error (47%), and AI introducing new risks (45%).
In relation to AI-specific security threats, 59% rated new AI tools being used by hackers as a major challenge, followed by protecting data used or generated by AI (53%), and compliance and regulatory risks caused by AI (53%).
When asked which parts of their company’s strategy was most affected by security concerns, 60% said being able to scale security operations in line with company growth, followed by handling employee and customer data across countries (58%), and working with new vendors and partners safely (49%).
False optimism?
Despite these concerns, 76% of businesses rated their company’s security as above average, with only 5% admitting it was below industry standards. In essence, legacy systems, skills shortages and outdated websites are all areas of vulnerability for many businesses.
This could be set to change in the future. Looking ahead to threats in the next three to five years, increasing use of AI was unsurprisingly number one at 55%, followed by cloud adoption and multi-cloud complexity (49%), and growing global regulatory and compliance requirements (45%).
