Around 45 of the industrial organizations lack a reliable leader for the cyber security despite a surge in the attacks, a recent survey report has revealed.
The survey, conducted by a software industrial company – Honeywell – in collaboration with LNS Research, said that a large number of industrial companies do not take cybersecurity seriously enough.
Titled “Putting Industrial Cyber Security at the Top of the CEO Agenda”, the survey includes responses from 130 decision makers from the industrial enterprises across the world.
45 percent of the respondents confessed that their organization don’t have a reliable cyber security leader.
40 percent said they have a chief of cybersecurity while 15% said they are planning to hire a cybersecurity leader in 2018.
Only 37% of the responding companies said that they are monitoring for suspicious behavior.
“These results may not be all that surprising, considering some of the newer solution providers are offering passive monitoring for the industrial control systems and networks; the benefits are clear and the upfront costs have been dramatically slashed,” the survey said.
45% of the industrial companies l do not have a reliable enterprise leader for cyber-security.
The study found that though most of the companies are conducting assessments on regular basis, 20% are not doing so at all.
“Decision-makers are more aware of threats and some progress has been made to address them, but this report reinforces that cyber-security fundamentals haven’t been adopted by a significant portion of the industrial community,” said Jeff Zindel, vice president and general manager, Honeywell Industrial Cyber Security.
“In order to take advantage of the tremendous benefits of industrial digital transformation and IIoT, companies must improve their cyber-security defences and adapt to the heightened threat landscape now.”
The study urged the industrial organisations to take immediate actions to capture the value of the new technologies.
“Cyber security needs to be part of every CEO’s agenda to ensure the effective, immediate and long-term deployment of strategies and technologies such as IIoT,” said Matthew Littlefield, President and Principal Analyst, LNS Research.
“Use an Operational Excellence model of people, process, and technology capabilities to enable Digital Transformation and build industrial cybersecurity capabilities into the model. Focus on best practices adoption – across people, process, and especially technology capabilities,”.
“In short, in order for a business to succeed on its digital transformation journey, it needs to succeed with industrial cyber-security.”
