infodas Survey on IT and Cybersecurity after Covid-19

• IT and Cybersecurity spending will grow despite COVID-19 and recession
• Only 50% of organizations has information security management system (ISM)
• Only every 3rd organization has a business continuity and resiliency plan
• Majority sees trend to invest in on-premises infrastructure and IT/IT-Security staff

Cologne, 06/02/20 – Despite the ramifications of the Covid-19 pandemic on the economy and daily activities, most German companies and public sector institutions want to expand their IT and IT-Security spending. In fact, the current crisis helped identifying areas of improvement in existing digitization efforts.

These are two key findings of a recent survey conducted in May 2020 by INFODAS, one of the leading Cybersecurity cross domain solutions and consulting firms in Germany, among 300 German IT and IT-Security decision makers with the public sector, large corporations and SMEs. The study’s objective was to better understand whether risk and opportunities of digitization were newly evaluated after the past weeks of lock-down and repercussions of the global Corona crisis.

Even though the frequency and damage of Cyber attacks in Germany is on the rise, only half of all respondents confirmed that an information security management system (ISMS) was in place. Only every third organization has a business continuity plan (BCP) in place to uphold resilience in case of crisis such the Corona pandemic, a Cyber attack or supply chain interruptions.

While every fifth employee in Germany is currently working from home, 42 percent of survey participants do not consider professional information security measures (VPN, encryption, IAM) for their employees home office important. However, in general the majority is trying to optimize their Cybersecurity strategy and activities.

Despite rising IT budgets, 88 percent of IT-security decision makers hope to reduce costs through digitization. Contrary to the dominance of IT outsourcing in the past 20 years, on-premises infrastructure and internal resources are considered important assets for the future relative to external service providers.

The Corona crisis really showed organizations which service provider they could rely on. Two third of all respondents intend to change the service-level-agreements with their external IT and IT security providers.

“Considering rising IT budgets, Covid-19 seems to facilitate digitization in Germany”, says Dr Alexander Schellong, VP Global Business with infodas. However, he is also warning that rising Cybersecurity spending does not automatically result in a stronger Cybersecurity posture. Many Cyber attacks could just be thwarted by a slight change in human behavior. Decision makers have to deal with a diffuse and ever changing Cyber threat landscape and a confusing number of complex or point to point solutions that need to be evaluated.