Cloud and vulnerabilities in IT systems are the two greatest concerns for IT decision-makers, driving a trend favouring actionable threat intelligence, faster incident response and managed security services, according to new Fortinet research.
Patrice Perche, senior executive vice-president: worldwide sales and support at Fortinet, explains: “Our independent study highlights the urgent need among enterprise-scale organisations from all sectors in EMEA to prioritize end-to-end cybersecurity protection with actionable, threat intelligence capabilities in the face of new digital business challenges.
“Enterprises need to respond more rapidly and effectively to security breaches by investing in integrated, adaptive cybersecurity architectures for the borderless network.”
The new research reveals the cybersecurity strategies of IT decision makers (ITDMs) at 250+ employee organisations across EMEA:
* 48% claim the best response to increased security breaches is to invest in new cyber security technologies that provide protection across the entire threat lifecycle.
* The two greatest concerns of ITDMs were securing the cloud and protecting against vulnerabilities in IT systems – at 53% of respondents for both.
* However, many see increased security breaches as a catalyst for outsourcing cybersecurity functions to a managed security service provider (MSSP). In all, the research found that within three-five years, 44% of EMEA organisations could be addressing their cybersecurity priorities through outsourcing. The forecast for cybersecurity outsourcing adoption is highest in Germany (where a 14% of all organisations will make the switch) and slowest in Spain (4%).
The survey examined the response tactics of those affected by cyber attacks to illustrate how present security infrastructures have struggled to contend with the realities of an increasingly digital world. Of the half (52%) of all EMEA IT decision makers in the survey who reported a security breach in the last year, only 16% of them realised this within minutes of the breach occurring.
Such a deficiency in rapid, effective threat identification and response has proved to be highly costly to breached organisations as sensitive data is lost, systems are compromised and brand reputation is damaged.
The survey found that, to mitigate these attacks and better protect their organisations, the number one action undertaken by ITDMs is the use of threat detection technologies (17%), closely followed by cloud-based cybersecurity services (12%). Such capabilities are underpinned by the provision of actionable threat intelligence.
EMEA respondents cited ‘improved prevention of attacks’ as the greatest value of threat intelligence (43%), followed by ‘improved information security strategy’ (38%) and ‘improved detection of breaches’ (35%).
In terms of how and where new threat intelligence capabilities may be applied, 35% of those asked said they had their own threat research/incident response team monitoring all security activity in place today. Meanwhile, 26% of respondents claimed to outsource their cyber threat intelligence to a managed security service provider.
“IT decision-makers understandably want more resources to combat threats from all directions, but the answer doesn’t have to come in the form of spending more or ripping and replacing existing solutions,” says Paul Williams, country manager: SADC at Fortinet.
