MOSCOW, November 24. /TASS/. Bureaucracy and the inability to stop production hamper implementation of industrial cyber security solutions, Kaspersky Lab, multinational anti-virus and cyber security provider, stated in a report following a survey among 337 representatives of critical infrastructure enterprises around the world.
"As the main obstacles to the implementation of solutions for the protection of industrial environments, respondents of the Kaspersky Lab survey named the inability to stop production (34%), red tape, including too long approval process (31%) and delays associated with the fact that too many people are responsible for decision-making (23%)," the company said.
Most of the barriers reported by respondents in the survey are bureaucratic rather than technical.
Nearly half of organizations (46%) have encountered red tape in an industrial cyber security project. In addition to a lengthy approval process and a large number of approvers, drawn-out sourcing and procurement processes, as well as obstacles from other departments, create obstacles.
According to almost half of organizations (46%), the pandemic changed the priorities in industrial security. They will most likely need to change their cyber defense strategy on the go and quickly implement new practices. One in four organizations (24%) reported that the situation was aggravated by the cuts in the industrial security budget as a result of the pandemic.
"When discussing these obstacles with representatives of Russian enterprises, we found out that the latter are even more likely to encounter the obstacles reported by respondents around the world. At the same time, the budget cuts for the security of industrial systems affected the Russian industry to a lesser extent. In general, it is always more difficult to invest resources for projects without a transparent calculation of the return on investment, which often include cyber security initiatives," Georgy Shebuldaev, head of the new product development department at Kaspersky Lab, says.
In order to help companies accelerate their industrial cyber security projects, Kaspersky Lab recommends the following if an organization lacks relevant experience, it is best to implement solutions in stages - start by building organizational processes and implementing basic cyber security measures such as firewalls and endpoint protection, then move on to more complex projects such as network monitoring and intrusion prevention solutions. It is also worth allowing the introduction of only those operational technologies that have built-in security. This will help a company further simplify the implementation of security solutions and give security experts the opportunity to test new tools in these infrastructure segments.