A new Radware study shows: Pandemic-related changes in companies in the areas of personnel, processes and applications are permanent.
The vast majority (83%) of C-level executives expect that the changes they have made to people, processes and applications in response to the COVID-19 pandemic will survive the pandemic. This is the main result of the study "C-Suite Perspectives: Accelerated Cloud Migration but Lagging Security" that the security specialist Radware conducted with top managers worldwide. In the survey, 44% of the executives surveyed reported that the crisis was having a negative impact on their budgets, 43% reported staff cuts and 37% a reduced need for real estate.
76% of companies introduced cloud services faster than planned
The pandemic accelerated the migration of corporate infrastructure and applications to the cloud. 76% of companies were adopting cloud services faster than planned, and 56% of respondents said the contactless economy, i.e. e-commerce, on-demand content, video conferencing, etc., had a positive impact on their business. The rapid migration helped keep the business going, but it may have exacerbated cyberspace vulnerabilities due to a larger attack surface. 40% of survey participants reported increased cyber attacks in the midst of the pandemic. 32% said they rely on their cloud provider's security services to ensure security management for their public cloud resources.
Shift to the home office
"The transition to increased home working and new contactless online business models is not just temporary and is influencing the future strategy of how companies invest in cybersecurity," said Michael Tullius, Managing Director DACH at Radware. “Normally, companies would make such changes over a longer period of time. However, the pandemic forced a massive shift to remote work, which is now creating new security challenges. Leaders therefore need to review what they have implemented and how to ensure that a lack of cybersecurity is not undermining their goals.”
More than 80% of respondents said that over a quarter of their employees would work remotely in the future. Before the pandemic, just under every second company had enabled more than 25% of its employees to do so, and 6% had not enabled home office at all.
Trade in transition
About two in five retail sector respondents say they have made changes in real estate, including shop closings. Many retailers have been under pressure to adopt practices that make the customer experience easier, such as roadside collection, e-commerce and the increased use of contactless payments. More than any other sector, retailers reported the need to adopt cloud or hybrid cloud environments to make their networks more resilient. 57% said they plan to host their applications in either a public or private cloud environment by 2022.
Radware annually publishes the results and analysis of a survey among executives to better understand their perception of the current challenges and opportunities in the field of cybersecurity. That year, Radware worked with Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. (EMA). EMA conducted the global online survey of 2020 executives on behalf of Radware in July 260, with the number of respondents from America, EMEA and APAC being almost equally distributed. Respondents represent a wide range of industries and come from companies with minimum sales of $ 250 million and between 1.000 and 10.000 employees.
More on this at Radware.com
About Radware Radware (NASDAQ: RDWR) is a global leader in application delivery and cybersecurity solutions for virtual, cloud and software-defined data centers. The company's award-winning portfolio secures the company-wide IT infrastructure and critical applications and ensures their availability. More than 12.500 enterprise and carrier customers worldwide benefit from Radware solutions to quickly adapt to market developments, maintain business continuity and maximize productivity at low cost.