Asia-Pacific countries likely to invest on IT security infra

More companies in the Asia-Pacific region, including the Philippines are poised to spend more on IT infrastructure in the next three years, as complexities in technology continue to rise.

According to the latest edition of Kaspersky’s annual IT Security Economics report, Small and Medium Businesses, and enterprises in the region plan to increase their IT security by 17 percent more than the global average of 14 percent.

The report identified that factors that drive cybersecurity spending for companies of all sizes include; increased complexity of IT infrastructure, the need to improve the level of specialist security expertise, and geopolitical or economic uncertainty.

Kaspersky, a global cybersecurity and digital privacy company conducted 3,230 interviews across 26 countries from businesses with more than 50 employees. Out of which, 834 respondents were from Asia Pacific.

The poll suggests that IT budgets for cybersecurity are set to increase again over the next three years for both SMBs and enterprises to cover a range of issues. Median cybersecurity budgets in 2022 were US$3.75m for enterprises with $12.5m allocated for IT generally, while SMBs invested $150k in IT security from $375,000 median IT budgets.

In Asia-Pacific (APAC), SMBs and enterprises here are set to increase their online defense budget by three percent more than the global average of 14 percent.

“The recent EY CEO Outlook Pulse, revealed the combined pandemic-related disruptions, rising inflation, geopolitical tensions, and climate change haunted enterprises in the Asia-Pacific region last year. Adding up to this are the cybersecurity incidents like data breaches and ransomware attacks which crippled major businesses in the region in 2022. Increasing spending on cybersecurity is a right step towards building companies’ defenses against cyberattacks and protecting their assets against black swans that 2023 may bring,” said Chris Connell, Managing Director for Asia-Pacific at Kaspersky.

The additional budgeting hopefully would help local companies in APAC address most concerning issues related to IT security. This year, just over half (59 percent) of businesses consider issues with data protection to be the most challenging. The second most important concern highlighted by 51 percent of respondents was the cost of securing increasingly complex technological environments, followed by issues with cloud infrastructure adoption (44 percent).

“Business continuity is ever dependent on information security. Nowadays when infrastructure becomes more complex and cyber-attacks become more sophisticated, businesses are becoming more cyber aware and better understand the need for protecting every asset inside the organization,” noted Ivan Vassunov, VP, of Corporate Products at Kaspersky.

“State regulations are another important factor influencing the growing budgets for information security. These organizations require businesses to keep their operations and data security. Sometimes regulators tighten rules for the whole vertical market or industry,” added Vassunov.

To maximize the efficiency of cybersecurity investments and minimize the risk of any attacks and data breaches for businesses, effective endpoint protection with threat detection and response capabilities should be used.