Cybersecurity defences are being strengthened across large organisations this year, new research shows.

Cyber consultancy Wavestone‘s new Cyber Benchmark 2024 report shows that companies with over $1bn in revenues will on average have one cyber expert per 1086 employees.

This is up by 15% in 2023, when the same companies only had one cyber expert per 1285 employees.

The financial sector lead in this figure, with one cyber expert per 267 employees.

Further the report found that more and more companies have launched initiatives aimed at talent retention to ensure that they maintain a steady level of cyber expertise in their organisation.

The emphasis on retention makes sense as there is currently a shortfall of about 4 million cybersecurity specialists worldwide, and the majority of professionals (92%) saying they have a skills shortage in their organisation.

The report also found that cyber budgets represent 6.6% of the IT budget across all sectors, and that cyber maturity was slightly higher among larger groups, which validated their efforts made in terms of budgets and talent attraction.

Large organisations are outpacing smaller organisations in terms of the cybersecurity basics, as 54% of smaller companies (those with less than $1bn in sales) remain fragile to ransomware risks.

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Despite this, there have been areas of particular progress in terms of cybersecurity.

Cloud security is up 5%, driven by advances in platform administration security. However, this confidence may wane as transitions to the multicloud bring potential complexity to cloud security efforts.

Data security itself has also increased (+4%), linked intrinsically to AI advancements and its accompanying challenges.

The report even deemed some areas of cybersecurity as outstanding, such as the security of third parties like partners, suppliers, and increasing interconnected sources of attack, at 48.9% maturity. Industrial systems also show room for improvement, at 39.9% maturity.