Barracuda survey reveals top security concerns for Australian businesses

Loss of customers and mission critical data are top concerns for Australian businesses, according to a new survey from Barracuda.

The report titled 'Securing Your Apps in the Borderless Cloud' takes an in-depth look at public cloud adoption trends, network and application vulnerabilities, and a variety of related security concerns amid rapid cloud adoption.

Commissioned by Barracuda and conducted by independent market researcher Vanson Bourne, the survey includes responses from 750 IT decision makers globally who are responsible for their organisations cloud infrastructure of which 250 were in APAC. They came from organisations of all sizes and across a broad range of sectors.

The report highlights the rising security challenge and associated costs in Australia.

Overall, cyber attacks in all geographic regions have increased by about 20% since 2017.

In Australia, 68% of respondents report being targeted by a cyber attack at least once, with 38% saying they have been attacked between two and five times.

Another 28% are not aware of falling victim to cyber attacks.

Organisations spend between one and two days per week on average preventing and managing cyber attacks. Time spent on this work is high in Australia, an average of six hours.

More than one third (36%) of Australian participants do not feel they are fully protected in the cloud and data loss is front of mind.

Despite the growing confidence in public cloud in general, 92% of Australian respondents have added or plan to add extra security measures to their public cloud deployments.

Half of Australian respondents are worried about losing sensitive, mission-critical data (50%).

In addition to data loss, crippled day-to-day operations due to temporary shutdown of mission-critical applications (54%), and lost customers (60%) are top security concerns to Australian participants about a successful cyber attack.

Most organisations realise the potential risks of application vulnerabilities and understand the need to protect applications.

Furthermore, 26% of Australian respondents say application security provided by the cloud infrastructure providers is insufficient and believe that they need to add protection for applications that can be accessed by external users (86%), involve eCommerce or PII (82%), or can be accessed via mobile devices (88%).

Barracuda sales engineer manager APAC, Mark Lukie, says, "As applications are rapidly becoming the most exploited threat vector, these security concerns underscore the importance to safeguard data with confidence by eliminating application vulnerabilities and stopping data breaches.

"By deploying a strong and secure web application firewall (WAF), organisations can be reassured about public cloud security and take advantage of all the business benefits inherent in leveraging the cloud.