A new survey by IT risk management firm RiskOptics illustrates how IT personnel at varying levels of seniority aren’t necessarily seeing eye-to-eye when defining terms like risk—and may have very different views about the biggest problems facing their departments.
59% of directors and 51% of managers named the sheer quantity of cyberattacks their biggest day-to-day challenge—while 52% of those at the SVP level say that their biggest headache is that the C-suite doesn’t understand cyber and IT risks. Senior executives at the C-suite level named their most significant challenges as insufficient funding (42%) and leadership turnover (40%).
Despite all respondents to the survey working in the same fields, just 45% picked the same definition of risk, while only 47% agreed on the definition of threats.
Why do we care?
We have a long way to go. There’s a similar disconnect with customers too. One of the risks of a space like cybersecurity is not only the words used being non-impactful. It’s also that we may not have the same definitions. Remember, this data is those in IT itself, and so expect the numbers to be far worse with non-technical customers.