A massive 84% of the organisations who took part in a recent survey suffered a significant security incident in the past two years.
The State of Security 2021 report polled 535 security leaders in nine leading economies across multiple industries by research firm Enterprise Strategy Group, on behalf of Splunk. It was conducted in February of this year, one after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and two months after the exposure of the SolarWinds hacks.
“This [the number of organisations attacked] is particularly concerning when we note that most organisations prefer to keep breaches under wraps,” says Justin Lee, MD of Obscure Technologies, which distributes Splunk in South Africa.
“The report also found that the costs and impacts of attacks were far reaching, including the need for significant time and personnel resources allocated to manage and recover from the incident; lost productivity; disruption of applications, systems, and business processes; breaches of confidential data; employees terminated or prosecuted; and criminal investigations,” notes Lee.
The report highlights 2021’s challenges as cloud complexity and the expansion of remote work.
Hybrid visibility is difficult enough with one cloud service provider, but the survey finds that:
* 75% of cloud infrastructure users are multicloud today.
* 87% expect to use multiple cloud service providers two years from now.
* 76% of respondents say that remote workers are harder to secure.
* 53% say attacks have increased during the pandemic.
* 12% call it a significant increase.
“In the past two years, the move to remote work and rapid adoption of cloud have only served to extend networks and increase the risks organisations face,” says Lee. “It has become a challenge, along with the new complexity of managing multicloud environments with different control planes. Additionally, organisations globally – and even more so in South Africa – are grappling with a severe shortage of specialised IT security skills.”
With 84% of organisations reporting a significant security incident in the past two years it is not surprising that 78% of companies expect another SolarWinds-style supply chain attack with 88% of organisations surveyed saying they are increasing security spending and 35% are increasing it considerably.
“These are telling statistics that endorse our belief that the only way to overcome these challenges is to embed security throughout the enterprise, viewing it as a revenue generator thanks to its ability to build trust and support business. In addition, organisations need to be stepping up their investments in AI, machine learning and automation to step up their security posture,” adds Lee.
“Many security leaders are taking action to keep up with intensifying security challenges. More spending and more technology are only as good as the strategies behind them, so a focus on cloud complexity, with better analytics and a clearer view of your data, is essential.”
The research puts forward some key recommendations, including:
* Modernise the security operations centre (SOC) with zero trust, security operations process automation, modernised security information and event management (SIEM), and training and staffing.
* Set your sights on a consolidated view of data.
* Rethink your approach to supply chain threats.
* Press your collaborative advantage.