A recently released report reveals more than half of senior leaders have no involvement in their company's cyber cases. 

"The Cyber-Resilient Organization: Maximum Preparedness with Bullet-Proof Recovery Survey", a new IDC report commissioned by Commvault, surveyed more than 500 security and IT operations leaders worldwide to get a current view of how organizations are perceiving modern security threats and approaching cyber resilience. 

The research shows that in many cases, senior executives/line-of-business leaders are minimally engaged in their company's cyber preparedness initiatives — 33% of CEOs or managing directors and 21% of other senior leaders are heavily involved. According to the research, the majority (52%) of senior leaders have no involvement in their company's cyber cases.

The report reveals there is also often confusion between ITOps and SecOps teams in terms of who is doing what when it comes to cyber preparedness. According to the report, 30% of SecOps teams fully understand ITOps' roles and responsibilities for cyber preparedness and response, and  29% of ITOps teams fully understand what falls to SecOps.

Sixty-one percent of respondents believe that data loss within the next 12 months is "likely" to "highly likely" to occur due to increasingly sophisticated attacks. Of the respondents surveyed, on-premises workloads were thought to be more vulnerable than cloud workloads. On a scale of 1-5, with 5 being highly vulnerable, respondents rated on-premises data repositories a 2.8 and physical workloads a 2.77 — higher than that of cloud workloads (2.67).

The research also shows that data exfiltration attacks — when malware or a malicious actor carries out an unauthorized data transfer — occur almost 50% more often than encryption attacks, where hackers aim to decode encrypted data. Respondents ranked phishing as the most concerning threat to address, given that most ransomware attacks begin with a successful attack on user credentials.

Additionally, as cyber attackers deploy more clever tactics, relying on manual detection and reporting processes are very likely to result in missed anomalies and successful attacks. A potential solution — automation — could lead to faster detection to mitigate the intrusion impact. However, 57% of organizations have limited automation for key functions and 22% report being fully automated.