Only a quarter (25%) of business leaders across Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) are confident in their current cyber security, according to a new study commissioned by VMware in partnership with Forbes Insights.

While there is no statistic available for South Africa, only 33.33% of South African respondents are extremely confident in the readiness of their people and talent to address security concerns.

In EMEA that figure is 83%.

Moreover 69.9% of business leaders and IT security practitioners in South Africa believe the security solutions their organisations are working with are outdated. This is despite 40% acknowledging that they have acquired new security tools over the past year to address potential security issues.

Research shows that 54% of businesses in EMEA plan to spend more on detecting and identifying attacks, in South Africa the figure recorded is 100%.

According to VMWare and Forbes Insights, there is a chasm between business leaders and their security teams on how they perceive progress and collaboration around cyber security.

"Only 21% of IT teams consider their business leaders (C-suite executives) to be highly collaborative when it comes to cyber security. Meanwhile, 27% of executives say they are collaborating in a significant way to address cyber security issues, versus only 16% of IT security practitioners," reads a statement issued by the companies.

Sylvain Cazard, VP SDDC EMEA at VMware, said: "As defined by Einstein, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. This is what is happening with IT security, where investment in traditional security solutions continues to be dwarfed by the economic repercussions of breaches. We now live in a world of greater complexity, with more and more complex interactions, more connected devices and sensors, dispersed workers and the cloud, all of which have created an exponentially larger attack surface. This has changed the rules. Modern-day security requires an investment shift away from trying to prevent breaches at all costs and towards building intrinsic security into everything - the application, the network, essentially everything that connects and carries data. Breaches are inevitable but how fast and how effectively you can mitigate that threat is what matters."

Again, research shows that in EMEA close to one-third (29%) of respondents have 26 or more security products installed across their enterprises. In South Africa the figure is 33.33%.

While nearly a third (31%) of IT security respondents in EMEA say it takes up to a week to address a cyber security issue, in South Africa the statistic is 23.33%.

83% admit they plan to increase the purchase or installation of new security products in the next three years, in South Africa 76.67% plan to do the same.

Cazard continues, "Encouraging a culture of security awareness and collaboration across all departments and teams is also an imperative. Business executives and security and IT operations have to be speaking the same language and recognise what's at stake. Investing in the right people to drive cyber best practice forward will see EMEA enterprises stay one step ahead in the world of sophisticated cybercrime."