Cybercrime and network breaches have become an almost everyday occurrence, and you would be hard-pressed to find a company that hasn’t had an online scare of some kind.

The latest major company that fell victim to a hacker was internet giant Yahoo, when it acknowledged last week that as many as 500 million user accounts have been compromised.

According to Peter Sondergaard, vice president at business analysis company Gartner, security related issues and having to constantly upgrade systems is just par for the course – for a very long time to come.

“The area of security is going to be the one area which every organisation on the face of the earth is going to be dealing with for a very long time. And no organisation is immune to that challenge,” Sondergaard said during a media roundtable.

He also added that companies should get ready to stretch their wallets a bit further, as attacks are getting more complex every day.

“I think we will increasingly see companies spend more on security and that is a critical component to what an organisation needs to determine – where that responsibility needs to sit. Particular when we move into the area of connecting things which are very impactful on our lives.”

According to cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab, as many as one third of users have fallen victim to cybercriminal schemes, and only 60% of users have installed security solutions on all the devices they use to access the Internet.

This was highlighted through the company’s Cybersecurity Index, the first global index to measure the current cyber threat levels faced by Internet users.

“Many users today, we believe, do not expect to come face-to-face with cyberthreats, so they fail to install security solutions on their devices and behave carelessly online. This makes them easy targets for cybercriminals,” said Andrei Mochola, Head of Consumer Business at Kaspersky Lab.

This ties in with what Sondergaard believes, as many companies might not see the need for a sophisticated cybersecurity solution.

But as attacks become more prevalent and complex, Sondergaard expects organisation to fork out more for protection in the future – not only for its businesses, but also for its customers.