Ninety Percent Of Companies Suffered Cybersecurity Incident In Past Three Years: Report

Seasoned IT leaders are key to security, the report found.

A whopping 90 percent of companies had a cybersecurity incident in the past three years, according to a new report from Teleport, which provides technology to secure access to customers' infrastructures.

Moreover, 52 percent of businesses experienced four cybersecurity incidents in the last three years, and 24 percent experienced 11.

Teleport's 2024 Secure Infrastructure Access report surveyed 250 U.S.- and U.K.-based IT leaders.

The report compared responses from seasoned IT leaders versus novices and revealed differences between the two groups and how having more experienced IT leaders can help keep organizations safer from cyber threats.

Some key takeaways:

• "Organizations with well-established infrastructure access security experienced 6x fewer incidents, with leaders suffering an average of two incidents over the last three years compared to the 12 suffered by novices. 67% of novices also feel there have been more incidents over time compared to just 16% of leaders."
• "Novices are 50% more likely to experience costs related to an incident. The estimated [annualized] cost of security incidents, calculated by factoring the likelihood each cost was incurred, multiplied by the cost per incident, is $6 million for novices. This is compared to just $637,310 for leaders - 90% less."

• "71% of novices perceive the threat of security incidents to be growing over time, compared with 28% of leaders. In fact, 39% of leaders believe it is getting significantly smaller. Leaders were, on average, 20% more likely to report doing well in a wide variety of infrastructure access security outcomes, including ensuring system availability (94%), preventing unauthorized access (93%), and protecting sensitive data (93%) among the best performing. In contrast, novices reported struggling the most with passing compliance audits (35%), maintaining system integrity (28%), and ensuring system availability (27%)."

Ev Kontsevoy, CEO and co-founder of Teleport, said that the “findings highlight that upfront investment in secure infrastructure access pays off in the long term and that while incidents do occur, exemplary organizations can protect their brand reputation and reduce the cost of incidents, supporting the business outcomes that infrastructure is designed to enable.”