COMMENT
“Cyber security needs
to be elevated to
cyber resilience.”
in the skills and capabilities necessary
to manage cyber security risks among
government and private institutions and
individuals in Dubai.
factor as the single greatest challenge
facing enterprise security out a list of
nine issues.
The second domain relates to
innovation in the field of cyber security,
and the establishment of safe and
secure cyber space, so as to encourage
further innovation in Dubai.
The objective of the third domain is
to secure cyber space by establishing
controls to protect the confidentiality,
integrity, availability and privacy of data.
The fourth domain focuses on establishing
and maintaining cyber resilience, ensuring
the continuity and availability of IT
systems in a digital environment.
Authorities in Dubai believe these
objectives can only be achieved
through the national and international
collaboration among different sectors,
and, as such, the fifth domain is related
to cyber security co-operation and
information exchange.
It is impressive and formidable that
local and federal governments like
those of the UAE, Abu Dhabi, Dubai,
Singapore and others are assuming
a proactive stance to cyber securing
public digital infrastructure with the
view to safeguarding their societies’
digital futures.
DarkMatter’s own research points to
a burning requirement to reduce the
gap between the pace of innovation
powered by digitisation, and the
extension of cyber resilience to
networks and devices in a much more
rigorous fashion.
According to a DarkMatter survey,
employees ranked the rising
sophistication of cyber attacks as the
24
INTELLIGENTCIO
Harshul Joshi is Senior Vice
President of Cyber Advisory Services
at DarkMatter.
“Over 30% of
respondents
said they
perceived
spending on
cyber security
within their
organisations
as being partly a
cost and partly
an investment.”
leading challenge to enterprise security.
According to a recent survey conducted
by the firm, private sector and
government employees ranked the rising
sophistication of cyber attacks as the
leading challenge to enterprise security
in the foreseeable future, according to a
survey of over 1,500 respondents. 28%
of private sector employees and 35%
of government employees ranked this
Private sector employees went on
to rank a lack of budget and the
requirement to manage security in a
24/7 live business environment as the
second- and third-placed challenges
facing enterprise security going
forward, with government employees
identifying the very same challenges,
only in reverse order.
The survey showed that 59% of
private sector respondents believe
their organisations experience multiple
material cyber security incidents on
an annual basis, with a further 22%
of respondents stating they were
unsure whether their organisations
did so or not. Given that organisations
regularly face cyber incidents, or even
breaches that they remain unaware of,
it would be reasonable to expect that
the number of organisations to have
suffered some type of cyber security
incident is significantly higher than
survey participants’ estimates.
In findings that run contrary to the
expanding threat surface of the modern
cyber security landscape, 67% of
private sector respondents and 78%
of government employees said they
believe cyber defences are effectively
keeping up with the expansion of cyber
threats. We believe this outlook may
explain why, despite organisations
globally spending billions of dollars a
year on cyber security defences, the
number and impact of cyber breaches
continues to rise drastically.
Within our survey, across private
sector and government employees,
over 30% of respondents said they
perceived spending on cyber security
within their organisations as being
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