According to Kaspersky's IT Security Economics survey, respondents in North America claim data leakages of internal systems caused either by cyberattacks (19%) or employees (20%) are the most concerning security issue encountered by SMBs and Enterprises. Heightened concerns over data protection increasingly also turns business leaders' attention to the transparency policies of their suppliers.

Kaspersky's global research conducted among IT decision-makers shows a loss or exposure of corporate and customer information because of a data breach is a major headache for companies. 47% of respondents from North American organizations of all sizes named this issue the most challenging aspect related to IT security. Among other most common concerns there are the cost of securing increasingly complex technology environments (44%), cost of inadequate planning (36%) and issues with cloud infrastructure adoption (34%).

Thinking more specifically about the most distributing security challenges respondents faced, most indicated incidents affecting IT infrastructure hosted by a third party (22%), leaked data from internal systems caused by cyberattacks (19%) and managing security across different computing platforms (17%).

Given that data protection has turned into the most alarming business security issue, companies are now attaching considerable importance to their suppliers' and contractors' transparency policies. Of those questioned, 91% consider the presence, or absence of transparency policies is important for going into business with a supplier or contractor. While 84 % of surveyed organizations worldwide already have transparency policies in their organizations, 86% confirmed their readiness to invest resources in developing it further.

"Today, we see organizations are being more conscientious when it comes to data security and that a responsible approach towards data management is becoming an essential when considering suppliers and contractors," said Yuliya Shlychkova, head of public affairs at Kaspersky. "To help their customers and partners ascertain that the required standards for ensuring   data security are applied, more and more companies are adopting transparency policies. Kaspersky has been one of the industry's pioneers in building digital trust - we have provided our stakeholders with a number of instruments to validate the trustworthiness of our solutions and business operations, and we're determined to further work with our partners to turn transparency into an industry-wide standard for the sake of greater cyber resilience."

To minimize the risk of any attacks and data breaches for businesses, Kaspersky recommends using endpoint protection with proven track record providing capabilities for threat detection and response. In addition, managed protection services will help organizations with their attack investigation and expert response. Comprehensive cybersecurity awareness training teaching how to avoid common security threats is also required to reduce the likelihood of incidents caused by employees.

For more insights about IT security costs and budgets in businesses in 2022 visit the interactive Kaspersky Calculator. The full report "IT Security Economics 2022" is available to download here.