Despite the heightened potential for increased hacks posed by Internet of Things (IoT) deployments, 70 percent of IT departments spend less than 20 percent of time securing corporate network and data assets.
A new Strategy Analytics report detailing 2016 security threats and trends - based on an independent survey of over 600 firms worldwide - claims that 56 percent of organisations acknowledge they may have experienced or might have had a successful breach in the last 12 months.
In comparison, 39 percent of businesses claim that their networks did not suffer any security breaches.
“The survey results are a huge wake-up call,” says Laura DiDio, Director of IoT Systems Research, Strategy Analytics.
“IoT environments exponentially increase the size of the attack vector since companies have so many more devices, end points and applications to secure.
“IoT deployments can potentially be very risky business.
“The survey results also revealed that 44 percent of corporations that got hacked were unable to determine, the source or the type of security attack or the duration of the breach, which is alarming.”
The survey data indicated that only seven percent of firms’ IT departments devote 50 percent of their time to security.
In addition, a 56 percent majority of respondents believe “end user carelessness” is the biggest security threat to their IoT networks followed by 42 percent who cited “malware.”
“Given the growth in edge processing, fog computing and edge analytics, the challenge of intelligence moving to the edge will continue to grow,” adds Andrew Brown, Executive Director IoT and Enterprise Research.
“It is imperative that security should be “built in” to any IoT offering, rather than leaving it to multiple vendors that are responsible for implementing security into only their part of the stack.”
