Aussie firms storing admin credentials on company PCs: CyberArk
A report from security firm CyberArk has revealed some Australian organisations are still storing administrative credentials in Word or Excel documents on company PCs, with 41 percent of those surveyed for its report admitting to the practice.
In the CyberArk Global Advanced Threat Landscape Report 2018, it was reported that 52 percent of Australian respondents and their organisations rarely change their security strategy substantially -- even after experiencing an attack.
57 percent of local respondents told CyberArk that ransomware or malware was the greatest cybersecurity threat they currently face, with targeted phishing attacks high on the threat list for 49 percent of respondents.
Insider threats was listed as a concern for 48 percent of Australians surveyed, and unsecured privileged accounts and unsecured data stored in the cloud for 44 percent, respectively.
45 percent of those surveyed in Australia also said their organisation can't prevent attackers from breaking into internal networks each time it is attempted, and 58 percent admitted their customers' privacy or personally identifiable information could be at risk because their data is not secured beyond the legally-required basics.
Tech market growth still slowly climbing
Forrester's latest Australia tech market outlook has predicted that local tech market growth will accelerate from 2 percent in 2017 to 4 percent in 2018, and then cool slightly to 3 percent in 2019.
Business and government purchases of tech goods and services in Australia -- in AU$ billions
The market research firm believes a total of AU$63 billion will be spent this year on tech goods, with software and computers and peripheral equipment both accounting for AU$14 billion each of the total spend.
In 2019, software spending will increase by AU$1 billion, Forrester predicts, and tech outsourcing will also have a further AU$1 billion spent on it in 2019 than this year.
See also: ATO spent AU$333m on employment outsourcing during year of outages
"Australian firms will invest in technologies that help them accelerate the delivery of new value for their customers. Cloud, automation, and AI will drive these technology investments," the company said in a statement. "We will also see more organisations build open digital platforms leveraging APIs to expand their value propositions to adjacent markets."
According to a recent survey conducted on 1,200 global business and IT decision makers by Vanson Bourne on behalf of cloud data management firm Veritas Technologies, 62 percent of Australia and New Zealand organisations have not fully evaluated the cost of a cloud outage, with 51 percent believing that dealing with service interruptions is the primary responsibility of the cloud service provider.
"Organisations are clearly lacking in understanding the anatomy of a cloud outage and that recovery is a joint responsibility between the cloud service provider and the business," Veritas said. "Immediate recovery from a cloud outage is absolutely within an organisation's control and responsibility to perform if they take a proactive stance to application uptime in the cloud."
Read also: Commonwealth pushes public cloud by default
Of the 1,200 individuals surveyed for the company's The Truth in Cloud study, 99 percent said their organisations will move systems to the cloud in the next 12 to 24 months, with 24 percent of ANZ organisations also expecting to outsource all on-premises infrastructure to the public cloud.
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