Middle East CEOs view cyber attacks as serious security concern, says PwC survey

The 24th edition of the PwC CEO survey revealed that, while 56 percent of regional business leaders remain concerned about the impact of pandemics and other health-related crises – up from 9 percent in 2015 – cyberattacks were also at the forefront of future planning.

According to the survey, 59 percent of CEOs in the Middle East aim to increase their investments in digital transformation by 10 percent or more over the next three years, as a direct response to the impact of Covid-19.

However, with that comes added risks, with 41 percent of the region’s CEOs admitting they are concerned about cybersecurity.

Overall, 74 percent regard cyberattacks and leaks as worrying threats to growth in 2021, compared with 68 percent in 2020; and 52 percent, against 59 percent globally, say that cyber threats feature in their organisation’s risk management.

Hani Ashkar, Middle East senior partner, PwC Middle East, told Arabian Business: “A growing number of CEOs have started to bolster their resilience against external and internal cyber threats by utilising technologies that prevent attacks before they begin.

“This investment is mostly aimed at embedding cyber resilience in (now more digitised) business processes, defining quantitative ways to measure risk in real time, implementing solutions and services to detect and respond to attacks in real time.”

The urgency of this is shown through the fact that 43 percent of respondents said they plan to increase investment in cybersecurity and data privacy by 10 percent or more over the next three years, well ahead of the global average of 31 percent. In addition, 41 percent think their organisation should be doing more to measure cybersecurity.

According to the survey, 59 percent of CEOs in the Middle East aim to increase their investments in digital transformation by 10 percent or more over the next three years

According to a recently released report from Mimecast, 81 percent of UAE respondents had received specialised work from home related cybersecurity training since the start of the pandemic – above the global average of 64 percent.

However, in the same survey, 61 percent of those questioned admitted to opening emails they thought looked suspicious while 50 percent did not report suspicious emails to their IT or security teams – compared to the global average of 45 percent for both opening and non-reporting of emails.

Other issues of concern troubling CEOs in the region include geopolitical uncertainty (41 percent), uncertain economic growth (41 percent) and availability of key skills (39 percent).