Report: Irish firms cut cybersecurity spend despite rising risks
Report: Irish firms cut cybersecurity spend despite rising risks
Publish Date: 2026-05-28 04:00:00
Source Domain: www.siliconrepublic.com
Reducing cybersecurity budget a ‘high-risk strategy’, said Saros Consulting co-founder.
Irish businesses show a split approach to security, with only half of the surveyed IT leaders admittedly increasing their cybersecurity budget, while one in four reduced spending for 2026.
This, as cybersecurity threats grow multi-fold in recent years, with bad actors increasingly employing AI tools to bolster their approach.
The insights stem from a new Saros Consulting report carried out by Censuswide, which surveyed 200 IT decision-makers in organisations in Ireland with more than 250 employees.
According to the survey, increased investments in cybersecurity is enabling leaders to explore new avenues to bolster their defences, with 30pc of the surveyed willing to pay bounties to experts who can expose vulnerabilities.
This is already happening in practice, with around 27pc admitting to have already done this.
Despite this, only 50pc are confident that they can detect attackers before any damage is done, while only 51pc said they have an incident response plan. And, only 54pc of those surveyed said that they test their incident response plan once or more per year.
Lacking an effective response plan often leads to significant financial and reputational damage for businesses at the hands of bad actors, with a different survey from 2025 reporting that nearly one-third of large enterprises in Ireland paid at least one ransom to cybercriminals over the year.
The average cost Irish businesses spent out of pocket in cyber ransoms amounted to nearly €700,000.
Meanwhile, businesses need to keep up with the constant change in the cybersecurity landscape by ramping up their own infrastructure.
In a recent interview with SiliconRepublic.com National Cyber Security Centre’s director of resilience Joseph Stephens shared his concerns around the effect advanced AI models such as Anthropic’s Mythos would have on small businesses in the…
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