UK firms in the dark around the impact of cyber attacks

The Resilience Gap study, which surveyed over 1,000 UK business decision makers, found there are more barriers to achieving the resilience that 97% of respondents believe to be important. Close to four in ten (38%) blame their organisation’s growing complexity as one of the biggest barriers to building business resilience, whilst one fifth (21%) blame siloed business units. Looking to their team and tools, over a third (35%) say the issue lies with the hackers being more sophisticated than IT teams, 21% claim that they don't have the skills needed within the company to accurately detect cyber breaches in real-time, and nearly a third (27%) claim that poor visibility of entry points are barriers to resilience.

Matt Ellard, Managing Director of EMEA at Tanium commented: "The speed of digital transformation has led organisations to purchase multiple tools to solve IT security and operations challenges, which is leaving IT infrastructures vulnerable to threats. Business resilience is fundamental to any strategy for long-term growth, yet the findings suggest that many UK businesses still have a long way to go. Organisations need to build a strategy for business resilience, and that starts with ensuring they have real-time visibility of where threats exist across their network, most crucially at the endpoints. If you can't pinpoint current vulnerabilities or the origin of a threat, how can you expect to defend against them?"

The study also revealed alarming gaps in accountability and trust across organisations. One of the main reasons why organisations are unable to achieve business resilience against disruptions such as cyber threats is due to growing confusion internally on where the responsibility for resilience lies. Over a quarter (28%) believe it should be the responsibility of the CIO or Head of IT, the same amount (28%) say every employee should be responsible, while 13% state full responsibility lies with the CEO alone. One in ten (11%) claim it falls to senior leadership / management.

"Businesses are becoming entirely dependent upon their technology platforms," continued Ellard. "But if that technology stops running, the business will too - with potentially serious consequences for sales, customer confidence, and brand equity - not to mention productivity. To deliver resilience, a new discipline needs to be instilled across governments and enterprise organisations. This discipline is more than prevention. It's more than recovery. It's a shared practice that should unite IT, operations and security teams to ensure strong security fundamentals are embedded across the entire company network. Only then can organisations act - and react - in real-time to threats."