The Future of Cybersecurity in Asia Pacific and Japan – Edition 5

Welcome to the 5th edition of Sophos’ The Future of Cybersecurity in Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ).

From our first edition in 2020, we have strived to highlight key issues impacting the ‘business of cybersecurity’ in organisations rather than deep technology dives. For this edition we have continued this focus with updated trend data on areas such as cybersecurity team structures, budgets and typical ‘cyber frustrations’.

Importantly, we have also continued last year’s research on cybersecurity burnout and fatigue. This is an area impacting almost all organisations across APJ and this year’s data shows little improvement from 2024. Pleasingly, there is one bright spot in the stress and burnout data, AI-augmented cybersecurity tools, with these alleviating some of the issues associated with ‘swivel chair fatigue’ and speed of threat identification.

Given the prominence of artificial intelligence (AI) in many business agendas, we were keen to understand the impact business AI solutions (such as agentic AI, copilots, etc) have on organisations’ cybersecurity postures and have incorporated this as a new section in this edition.