- The COVID-19 pandemic has expedited the use of digital tools in business and the home.
- These advances in digitalization have led to increasingly frequent, costly and damaging cyber incidents.
- The World Economic Forum’s Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2022 presents critical findings from 120 global cyber leaders on how to shift from cybersecurity to cyber resilience.
Digitalization has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. The global use of services such as video conferencing has grown tenfold. As the use of digital tools increases, so does the amount of data created. The World Bank estimates that, by 2022, annual total internet traffic will increase by about 50% from 2020 levels, reaching 4.8 zettabytes. If you were to store 4.8 zettabytes on DVDs, your stack of DVDs would be long enough to circle the Earth six times.
The pandemic has also shown us just how interconnected all businesses are and how increased digitalization has thrust the global population onto a new trajectory of cyber threats and attacks. In 2021, we saw critical infrastructure breaches and how one company’s cybersecurity can have a cascading effect on many others, from direct customers to end consumers, up and down the US’ Eastern Seaboard.
Considering these ongoing cyber challenges, the World Economic Forum’s Centre for Cybersecurity has published the Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2022 laying out foresight and critical findings collected from more than 120 global cyber leaders. What are their main perceptions, concerns and predictions?
Addressing gaps in cyber resilience
The Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2022 sheds light on valuable insights about the state of cyber and perceptions about the current path of cyber resilience. Our research suggests three main perception gaps between security-focused executives (e.g. a chief information security officer) and business executives (e.g. a chief executive officer). These gaps are most visible in the following three areas:
1. Prioritizing cyber in business decisions: while 92% of business executives surveyed agree that…
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