Jane Edwards
A new survey by Tenable Network Security says global cybersecurity readiness for 2017 received an average overall score of 70 percent from information technology security professionals, a figure that represents an average grade of “C-†and a 6 percent decline over the previous year.
Tenable polled in September 700 IT security professionals whose companies operate in nine countries and across seven industry sectors, such as government, financial services, retail and manufacturing, as part of the 2017 Global Cybersecurity Assurance Report Card, the company said Monday.
Tenable associated the drop in the overall cyber readiness score with a 12-percentage point decline in the 2017 Risk Assessment Index, which sought to measure the ability of respondents to evaluate cyber risks across 11 areas of the enterprise IT infrastructure.
Survey respondents cited lack of visibility into networks, cyber threat environment and low security awareness among staff as the top three challenges to IT security practitioners.
Cloud environments and mobile devices respectively received risk assessment scores of 60 percent and 57 percent for 2017, while DevOps environments and containerization platforms scored 57 percent and 52 percent in the risk assessment index.
“Today’s network is constantly changing — mobile devices, cloud, IoT, web apps, containers, virtual machines — and the data indicate that a lot of organizations lack the visibility they need to feel confident in their security posture,†said Cris Thomas, a strategist at Tenable Network Security.
India landed the top spot in the 2017 cyber assurance report card by country with an overall score of 84 percent, followed by the U.S. at 78 percent and Canada at 75 percent.
The retail sector scored 76 percent in the report card, while financial services and manufacturing industries both posted 72 percent in overall scores, according to the report.
