British businesses increasingly prioritise data privacy and security

More and more British businesses have prioritised data privacy in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, new research has found.

A study by security firm Netwrix discovered that the majority of the UK organisations are concerned about security-related issues and plan to enforce cybersecurity awareness among employees.

The pandemic appears to have helped engineer a major change in the IT priorities for organisations across the country as they look to respond to the evolving work environment.

Netwrix found that the top three IT priorities for respondents from the UK were network security (73%), data security (71%) and cybersecurity awareness among employees (69%).

UK organisations were found to be more focused on data privacy now than before, with 60% prioritised this option compared to 30% pre-pandemic – double the amount of businesses.

Some particular projects and areas saw a marked drop-off in interest, with the number of UK organisations that consider digital transformation as their top priority decreasing from 57% before the pandemic to 20% now.

The importance of cloud migration was found to have decreased from 52% before the pandemic to 22% now. Elsewhere, only 40% of the UK respondents plan to focus on automation of IT processes – down from 70% pre-pandemic, and compliance has moved from the middle of the list to the bottom of top-10 with 18%.

“Increasing cybersecurity awareness is a necessary measure for UK organisations since remote work has required them to address the human factor as one of the major cyber risks to sensitive data,” said Ilia Sotnikov, Vice President of Product Management at Netwrix.

“Yet, simply educating users is not enough – it is important that organisations have in place tools providing them with visibility into where this data resides and who has access to it. Coupled with more educated users, such an approach is one of the best ways to protect what’s important to enterprises today.”

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