The top five security priorities for 2023

And how WithSecure™ Elements can help

Reading time: 10 min

    Published

  • 11/2022
Craig Houston

Head of Content, WithSecure

What are the top cyber security priorities for 2023? To find out, we conducted the Pulse 2023 survey with 3,072 IT professionals from 12 different countries.

Everyone we spoke with was a security decision-maker or influencer, responsible for making vital cyber security decisions that keep their organization safe.

Here are the top five answers from Pulse 2023, and how WithSecure™ Elements can help protect your company and your customers from these leading threats.

Preventing data breaches

Preventing data breaches is the number one priority of the security professionals we interviewed. So, what’s the best way to keep them from happening? The most effective solution is a multi-pronged approach, combining Endpoint Protection, Endpoint Detection & Response, and Vulnerability Management. WithSecure™ Elements gives you all these capabilities through a single pane of glass.

EPP guards against data breaches across all your endpoints, protecting you against both known and zero-day threats. EDR combines speed with accuracy, allowing you to detect and respond to real threats when they occur, rather than getting bogged down by alert fatigue. 

Vulnerability Management relentlessly scans your endpoints, networks and systems looking for loopholes that an attacker could exploit. Pinpointing exactly where the most critical loopholes are located gives you the opportunity to fix them before any attacker spots and uses them. These solutions act together to protect your organization from data breaches. 

 

Ensuring protection against malware and ransomware

The second priority in Pulse 2023 was ensuring protection against malware and ransomware. No security professional needs to be told why it’s so vital to keep malware and ransomware from infecting your system. 

The threat intelligence powered behavioral and reputational analytics of EPP are your number one weapon against malware and ransomware. WithSecure™ Elements Endpoint Protection is the core element in your defense, an element you can set up, rely on, and forget. Our powerful solution will do the heavy lifting, allowing you to focus on what you do best.

 

Preventing advanced email-based threats

As you know, any company can fall prey to a cyber attack when a team member makes the wrong decision about an email attachment or link. That’s why protecting against advanced email-based threats such as phishing attacks and business email compromise is the third priority in the Pulse 2023 survey.

While training your employees to follow good security practices is essential, an extra layer of defense to protect against those mistakes is crucial. WithSecure™ Elements Collaboration Protection provides this layer.

WithSecure™ Elements Collaboration Protection is designed to fortify the built-in security measures of Microsoft 365. Phishing attacks are warded off and malicious content is detected, while account compromises and inbox rule manipulations are spotted and stopped in their tracks.

 

Ensuring the security of cloud-based collaboration applications

Collaborating in the cloud is the new way of doing business, and few organizations can do without it – especially with the growth of remote and hybrid work. Ensuring the security of cloud-based collaboration applications is the fourth priority in Pulse 2023. 

WithSecure™ Elements Collaboration Protection detects and blocks threats to your Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint collaboration environments. Your remote and hybrid workforce can safely work together and share files over OneDrive and SharePoint, no matter where they are or which devices they are working on.

Ensuring the security of devices, services and software

The pool of devices, services, and software is increasingly diverse, making it ever more challenging for many organizations to keep them all secure. Ensuring the security of devices, services, and software is the fifth priority from Pulse 2023. 

WithSecure™ Elements has three highly effective tools for achieving security across all your devices, services and software. EPP protects all your endpoints against both known and unknown threats. Endpoint Detection and Response zeroes in on the real threats so you can respond to them effectively, undistracted by false alarms. Meanwhile, Vulnerability Management scans every device and network in your organization, looking for loopholes and vulnerabilities that need to be patched.

Security spend

Although not in the top 5 security concerns to come out of our Pulse 2023 survey, a factor that constantly looms over IT decision-makers is the amount of budget they should be spending on their security. 

While our survey shows that cost is becoming a less decisive factor in cyber security decision-making, we cannot ignore the fact companies are having to allocate more and more to securing their organizations. In fact, by 2024 the global information security market is expected to be worth USD 174.7 billion

This indicates that many companies are responding to increased risks by increasing their spending on cyber security – a statement backed up by our research. 87.9% of EU-based respondents to the survey indicated that they were planning to increase their security spending over the next 12 months. By comparison, only 8.3% of respondents feel that their organization is already adequately protected or are considering reducing their cyber security budget.

Security spending is a major concern for many organizations, but the smartest choice isn’t necessarily to spend the smallest amount of money up-front. Can you save money by simply installing Endpoint Protection with nothing else? Maybe in the short term, but EPP is no longer enough to ensure full protection against hackers.

By choosing WithSecure™ Elements, you can benefit from Vulnerability Management, Collaboration Protection, and EDR – as well as EPP – giving you the extra protection that can save you significant money in the event of an attack.

WithSecure™ Elements

WithSecure™ Elements is a unified cloud-based cyber security platform offering protection against Malware, Ransomware, Advanced Persistent Threats, and more.

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