Pandemic effect: Why digital matters more than ever

In the era of the coronavirus pandemic, digital transformation and cloud security (79%) are the chart-topping topics enterprises want to know more about. These are followed by threat and vulnerability research (62%),and risk and compliance (49%),as shown by a pre-event survey of 2,064 business and IT decision-makers across Asia Pacific, Middle East,and Africa (AMEA). The survey is a precursor to Trend Micro’s CLOUDSEC 2020 virtual conference, taking place this week.

The results are unsurprising to an extent, given how many companies have accelerated their digital transformation projects and migration to the cloud, while the pandemic continues to wield debilitating influence over workplace collaboration, productivity, and the bottom line across many industries.

The survey shows that companies most frequently grapple with the inability to detect and respond to advanced threats (32%),which have seen a sharp increase since the pandemic started in the first quarter of the year; and the perennial shortage of security skills (32%), as cyber crimes become more sophisticated and security operations, more complex. Other common challenges include getting cloud security automation and configuration right (31%); asking for bigger budgets for cyber security (28%); obtaining complete visibility of threat vectors across the entire organisation (26%); and constantly having to justify cyber security investment (25%).

When it comes to acquiring hands-on experiences,respondents are most looking forward to learning about automated security and compliance posture remediation (68%), indicating that many of them are already operating in the cloud environment and are dealing with misconfiguration-led cyber security issues. “2020 is a year of profound challenges for enterprises. But on the bright side, companies are realising their digital potential,” said Dhanya Thakkar, senior vice-president,Trend Micro,Asia Pacific, Middle East,and Africa.