A staggering 86% of global organizations believe they will suffer serious cyber attacks in the next year and 80% reported they are likely to experience a data breach, according to a new report by Trend Micro and the Ponemon Institute. The greatest risk was found in North America.

Based on the global survey results, the greatest areas of concern for businesses are centered around three areas. Many organizations said they aren’t prepared enough to manage new attacks across employees, executives, and board members. Others stressed the lack of sufficient processes to combat attacks, ranging from patching to threat sharing. Finally, organizations have a strong need to evaluate their existing security tools and ensure they’re using the latest advanced detections technologies across their networks.

Taking the current threat landscape into consideration and based on the CRI findings, global businesses can still greatly minimize their risks by implementing security best practices. It’s important to build security around critical data by focusing on risk management and the threats that could target the data. Organizations should look to minimize infrastructure complexity and improve alignment across the whole security stack and review existing security solutions with the latest technologies. There must also be a focus on people. Senior leadership needs to view security as a competitive advantage and priority and organizations need to invest in both new and existing talent to help them keep up with the rapidly evolving threat landscape.

Trend Micro and the Ponemon Institute teamed up to investigate the level of cyber risk across organizations and create a Cyber Risk Index (CRI), a comprehensive measure of the gap between and organization’s current security posture and its likelihood of being attacked. A total of 3,677 respondents were surveyed across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America.