New Zealand companies are playing catchup with their cybersecurity - and losing, says Aura Information Security chief executive Andy Prow.
The rapid development of technology and online systems had resulted in firms loading information and data onto servers that were not always secure, Prow said.
"What we've been seeing is there's a perfect storm brewing where businesses have been holding data over a period of time on systems sitting in back-end offices, but what's happened is over the last few years in particular, everything needs to be online," he said.
"That catchup is what we call technical debt, in other words big systems that were never designed to be on the internet, now are," he said. "Not only is it playing catchup, but it's losing the race, so in our opinion at the moment in the world of IT the problem is getting bigger quicker than we're fixing it."
Prow said this was evident in the types of customers his firm was seeing, with a shift from the more traditional banking, government and telco organisations to the likes of hairdressers and other smaller companies.
