Study: Adoption Of New Security Solutions Becomes A Difficult Topic For Executives To Discuss With IT Workers

Topics that the executive finds difficult to discuss with IT staff (photo: Kaspersky)

JAKARTA - A study by Kaspersky revealed that, according to the majority of IT workers, the main reason for the decline in cybersecurity budgets is that top management does not see a reason to invest heavily in this area.

This special survey conducted by Kaspersky is intended to explore whether this situation may be the result of opaque communication between IT security staff and executives.

Ultimately, the study reveals, more than half of top managers in Southeast Asia (60%) think IT security employees should better communicate cyber risks to businesses.

Meanwhile, only 6% of cybersecurity workers from the region admit they have difficulty explaining their work to non-IT colleagues and executives.

“There is a clear communication gap between enterprise decision makers, non-IT C-Level executives, and the technical security team responsible for the company's cybersecurity posture,” said Chris Connell, Managing Director for Asia Pacific at Kaspersky, in a statement.

This is worrying because the same study shows that miscommunication between the two groups has negative impacts such as critical project delays (67%), one or more cybersecurity incidents (66%), and budget waste (60%).

The three most difficult things for C-Level executives to talk about with IT staff are: adopting new security solutions (37%), compliance with security regulations (37%), and changes to cybersecurity policies (33%).

Meanwhile, for IT workers, the top three themes for discussion with non-IT executives were the need to increase the IT security budget (55%), expand the IT security team (54%), and increase cybersecurity awareness among employees (52%).

“It can be assumed that non-IT executives struggle to discuss implementing new cybersecurity solutions due to the many complex technical terms and concepts that IT security staff frequently use. However, discussions about increasing the budget are difficult because C-Level executives expect IT staff to use business metrics to justify their needs,” said Ivan Vassunov, VP, Corporate Products, Kaspersky.