Australia’s 38% improvement in cyber recovery times has made us realize a harsh truth about corporate behavior. Companies won’t invest in cybersecurity until they’re legally forced to. The Optus and Medibank disasters didn’t just breach data. Instead, they demolished the illusion that complying voluntarily works in high stakes security.
But here’s what the surface metrics miss. Australian companies are getting better at cleaning up messes while remaining terrible at preventing them. Over half of them still don’t know where their data lives or how their systems connect, but they’re still recovering from attacks 17 days faster than last year. This can’t be termed as security improvement. It’s more like incident response training.
However, the real transformation is happening in boardrooms and not server rooms. When cybersecurity discussions moved from IT departments to executive suites, the entire power dynamic shifted. CISOs who previously begged for a budget are now briefing boards because directors finally understand that they face personal liability. Fear of regulation makes decision making faster than years of technical arguments ever could.
Australia’s 28-day recovery time is still behind the global 24-day average and this exposes a big flaw in security reforms that come during the crisis. Countries with better recovery times built their cybersecurity capabilities over decades and not after they heard breaches were hot in the headlines. Australia is playing catch up with reactive measures while competitors operate from mature and relatively proactive security foundations.
The market opportunity here is massive but misunderstood. Everyone’s investing in breach detection and incident response tools but the real money is in solving the foundational problem. What’s the foundation problem, you may ask. Data visibility and infrastructure mapping.
“I also put it down to the fact that the regulators are being more stringent and more strict on what their requirements are… cybersecurity was no longer confined to company tech departments and he had seen a rise in requests to brief boards on cyber resilience ‘because they’re worried about the regulation landscape’.” – Martin Creighan, Commvault Asia-Pacific VP