Thales conducted a survey of nearly 3,000 IT and security professionals in 18 countries for its data on security threats, trends, and emerging topics, which was released on Tuesday.
In the last 12 months, more than a third (37 per cent) of respondents in India reported a data breach, with 22 per cent reporting a ransomware attack on their organisation.
Cloud assets were identified as the most vulnerable to cyber-attacks by these respondents.
Cloud exploitation and attacks are on the rise, with 75 per cent of global respondents reporting that 40 per cent of data stored in the cloud is now classified as sensitive, up from 49 per cent in 2022.
Accidental breaches
Accidental breaches can occur due to simple human error, misconfiguration, or other errors, and respondents identified this as the leading cause of cloud data breaches. The primary cause identified by 55 per cent of respondents who had experienced a data breach in the previous 12 months was misconfiguration or human error.
Meanwhile, the severity of ransomware attacks appears to be decreasing, with 35 per cent of 2023 respondents reporting a significant impact, compared to 44 per cent reporting similar levels of impact in 2022.
Only 49 per cent of businesses reported a formal ransomware response plan, while 67 per cent continue to report data loss from ransomware attacks.
Digital sovereignty is also a growing concern for data privacy and security teams. Overall, the report found that data sovereignty continues to be a short- and long-term challenge for businesses.
Organisations are also concerned about emerging threats from quantum computers, which could compromise traditional encryption schemes. The report discovered that the top global security concerns from quantum computing were Harvest Now, Decrypt Later (HNDL), and future network decryption, with 62 per cent and 55 per cent reporting concerns, respectively.
The 2023 Thales Global Data Threat Report was based on a global 451 Research survey commissioned by Thales of almost 3,000 executives with responsibility for or influence over IT and data security.
The survey had respondents from 18 countries and was conducted in November and December 2022.