Vietnamese businesses suffer longest downtime after security breach: study

The regional average is 35 percent and the global average is 25 percent, according to the 2019 Asia Pacific CISO Benchmark Study recently released by U.S. technology company Cisco.

One of the reasons for the high downtime is a lack of trained cybersecurity personnel, the report, which polled almost 2,000 security professionals in the region, said.

Forty seven percent of Vietnamese businesses say a shortage of IT personnel prevents them from adopting more advanced security technologies, up 10 percentage points from last year. The global figure is 24 percent.

"Despite the appetite for security investments, it remains true that finding the right talent is a constant struggle," the report said.

But it said Vietnam excels at dealing with alerts and remediating them, adding 51 percent of alerts are investigated, higher than the regional average of 44 percent.

Local businesses manage to deal with 45 percent of threats, compared to 38 percent in the region.

The financial impacts of security threats have reduced in Vietnam. Only 18 percent of respondents said the most severe breach in the past one year cost them more than $1 million, compared to 77 percent last year.

Vietnam suffered 3,159 cyberattacks in the first six months of this year, a 45.9 percent decrease year-on-year, according to the Ministry of Information and Communications.

The country has among the best human resources in the world and could become a cybersecurity powerhouse, Minister of Information and Communications Nguyen Manh Hung said in April.