Middle East organisations lose over USD 1 mln in data breaches

The results of the research can be found in the third annual Data Security Confidence Index released by Gemalto.

Of the 1,100 IT decision makers surveyed worldwide, 50 were based in the Middle East. Of these respondents, 94% said their perimeter security systems such as firewall, IDPS, AV, content filtering and anomaly detection were effective at keeping unauthorised users out of their network.

In addition, 54% said they have suffered from a perimeter security system breach in the past 12 months. Also, 60% believe unauthorised users can access their network, and 36% said unauthorised users could access their entire network in the event of a data breach.

All organisations surveyed in the Middle East declared they experienced a breach at some time over the past five years. This suggests that organisations have not made significant improvements in reducing the number of data breaches despite increased investments in perimeter security.

Despite the increasing number of data breaches and more than 3.9 billion data records worldwide being lost or stolen since 2013, organisations continue to believe that basic perimeter security technologies are effective. The average cost of detecting and fixing the breaches was USD 35,232,000.

Sebastien Pavie, regional director for the Mena region, identity and data protection at Gemalto.said many IT organisations continue to rely on perimeter security as the foundation of their security strategies, but IT professionals need to shift their mindset from breach prevention to breach acceptance and focus more on securing the breach by protecting the data itself and the users accessing the data.