Indian enterprises not fully prepared to risk-proof digital

The digital transformation journey of Indian organisations is getting increasingly hindered by cyberattacks, according to a study conducted by cybersecurity company Forcepoint along with IT analyst firm Frost & Sullivan.

The study revealed that 95 per cent of organisations have embarked on a digital transformation journey.

However, 61 per cent of respondents shared that the risk of cyberattacks is stalling their digitalisation progress.

For those organisations that have begun executing their digital transformation projects, 46 per cent of them have encountered a security incident and 20 per cent of the organisations didn't conduct breach assessment regularly in the last 12 months, it said.

In fact, only 18 per cent respondents thought about cyber security at the early stages of the digital transformation projects indicating the less mature approach by organisations to involve cyber security when designing digital transformation project, according to the study.

Seventy per cent of organisations think about cyber security only at the latter stages of the projects, the study revealed.

Kenny Yeo, Industry Principal, APAC ICT, Frost & Sullivan, said incorporating behaviour modelling into IT security architecture of organisations is certainly a way to identify potential risks and fend off cyberattacks.

"Adopting a behaviour-centric security approach that focuses on understanding users' behaviour on the network and within applications to identify behavioural anomalies can mitigate cyberattacks before they happen," said Alvin Rodrigues, senior director and security strategist at Forcepoint Asia Pacific.

The study highlighted that 76 per cent of businesses in India have adopted cloud computing, but organisations that have moved to the cloud are at higher risk with 47 per cent of them having encountered significant security incident within the span of 12 months.

One hundred respondent organisations across India participated in the study.

Sixty-two per cent of the organisations are classified under the large enterprise category with global annual turnover of more than USD 250 million.

Majority of the respondents are from IT services & BPO (37 per cent), followed by BFSI (27) and manufacturing sector (19), it was stated.