“While our cyber adversaries are becoming more adept, the likelihood and severity of cyber-attacks is also increasing due to our growing dependence on new information technology platforms and interconnected devices and systems,” the ACSC says.

Cyber security is an increasing challenge for Australian organisations. The prevalence of sophisticated attacks continues to grow, while the pandemic puts additional strain on existing security systems. According to its third State of Cyber Resilience Research report, Accenture found only 43 per cent of Australian businesses are actively protected by security measures.

IBM Security’s 2020 edition of the Cost of a Data Breach Report found that the average total cost of a data breach in Australia was priced at $3.35 million — an increase of 9.8 per cent year-on-year.

Ransomware has become one of the most significant threats given the potential impact on the operations of businesses and governments.

Though ransom demands may exceed millions of dollars, affected organisations have reported experiencing other substantial financial impacts and data losses associated with recovering from a ransomware incident, regardless of whether they paid the ransom.

These additional costs include rebuilding and hardening networks, implementing additional IT security controls, time and money spent on data recovery and absorbing the impact of lost productivity and revenue incurred while offline.

The ACSC responds to hundreds of cyber security incidents each year. Many of these could have been avoided or substantially mitigated by good cyber security practices.

Despite the increasing frequency of cyber-attacks and the fall-out they induce, certain myths persistently prevail - that an on-premise environment is somehow more secure than the cloud and that all cloud-hosted offerings are equal.

In truth, most organisations are ill-equipped to deal with increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks in-house and using a third-party Managed Service Provider (MSP) is no guarantee either.

If you’re now considering a major server upgrade – either on-premise or via a third-party MSP – then it’s time to investigate alternatives.

When G&C Mutual Bank decided the time was right for an upgrade, several options were investigated. G&C Chief Information Officer, David Chapman said security was a chief concern.

“An assessment of our previous MSP environment resulted in a lot of red flags. In a world of hackers and cyber security, we needed to make a change and moving to Software as a Service (SaaS) has erased all of these issues for us,” he said.

The benefits of SaaS go beyond superior security. Committing to an on-premise or MSP cloud-hosted delivery model means it is difficult to stay on the latest version of the software – or undertaking a complex, costly and error-prone process to upgrade.

As Boards are increasingly being asked to sign off IT security and privacy risk assessments, shifting to a highly accredited SaaS platform will significantly and demonstrably reduce the IT security and privacy risk profile.

To learn more about TechnologyOne’s commitment to security, visit
https://technologyonecorp.com/saas/security-and-trust