Share with Your Network
If you feel like cybersecurity is getting more challenging, you’re not alone. A recent Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) survey revealed about 70% of U.S. IT and cybersecurity professionals say security hygiene and posture management have become more difficult to manage over the past two years.
While this may not surprise us, the ESG report helps us understand why. Topping the list of factors complicating security operations and risk management are increasing attack surfaces, more third-party connections than ever, a surge in device diversity, and a greater reliance on public cloud infrastructure. A litany of other challenges is also pressing on security leaders trying to make smart data-driven decisions quickly: the emergence of hybrid work, infrastructure changes dictated by privacy and security regulations, and an uptick in the number of users connecting to networks and applications.
Security resilience buoys the future of your business
Since “unprecedented” and “unpredictable” have become status quo in global and economic backdrops, more business and security leaders are recognizing security resilience as a linchpin to organizational success today and in the future. And top analysts agree. Just last month, Gartner announced a handful of predictions for the coming year with a common motif running throughout resilience is paramount to reducing risk and surviving major disruptions that are all but guaranteed. Within this theme of resilience, Gartner anticipates by 2025, a whopping 80% of enterprises will embrace single-vendor solutions that can integrate web, cloud services, and private applications to help simplify workflows and access data easily and ramp up security efficiency and effectiveness.
Recognizing the need for resilience, Gartner anticipates that by 2025, a whopping 80% of enterprises will embrace single-vendor solutions that can integrate web, cloud services, and private applications to help simplify workflows, access data easily, and ramp up security efficiency and effectiveness.
Part of this resilience-based evolution is recognizing that security concerns and priorities are longer confined to the IT department. Instead, they impact other business pillars more than ever before. There’s a growing understanding that security investments should be viewed as business investments, protecting financial, operational, and organizational interests. And that ramping up security resilience can help.
Even though Gartner has mapped a clear trajectory for security operations, achieving security resilience can understandably seem just out of reach for those battling dozens of disparate security tools or struggling with spreadsheets. That’s why Cisco broke down the five key components needed to realize resilience so companies of all sizes, industries, and funding can understand what it takes to evolve.
Closing the gaps: Connecting across your ecosystem
An intricate, modern environment is often riddled with blind spots and silos which negatively impact data accessibility, application security, asset management, and technology integration. Closing these gaps enables teams to monitor and protect all business-critical assets consistently, unearth areas of concern (like forgotten legacy tools), integrate risk management tools, and aggregate data faster, lowering the turnaround time for monitoring, identifying, and resolving threats. Recent data backs up the importance of this capability.
According to the latest volume of Cisco’s Security Outcomes Study, which asked 5,100 IT and security professionals across 27 countries about their security operations and resilience, organizations with highly integrated systems for identifying critical assets and risks benefit from 41% stronger threat detection capabilities. These same organizations are also seven times more likely to establish automation for key risk management processes such as event monitoring, incident analysis, and incident response. The ESG survey echos these findings, citing that tight integration between Security and IT technologies is the most popular method to improve vulnerability management programs.
Thinking outside the IT environment box, the idea of closing the gaps can (and arguably should) be applied elsewhere to detail out underperforming processes, knowledge gaps, or buried inefficiencies. Auditing key workflows and capabilities can help identify these opportunities within areas like talent, processes, threat and vulnerability intelligence, education, and awareness.
Flexible, open solutions to help you clear any hurdle
For this vision to come to fruition, enterprise solutions must be able to support complex hybrid architectures comprised of dozens (if not hundreds) of different security tools. A tightly integrated and connected security environment demands an open solution designed to stitch together multiple facets together into a single, unified view to secure every endpoint, detect and respond to threats faster, and gain unfettered visibility.
Lucky for today’s enterprises, Cisco is building a multi-cloud, enterprise-security platform to support flexible, open architecture that lays the groundwork for security resilience. The Cisco Security Cloud is Cisco’s answer to navigating a future of not-yet-imagined threats and unknown change and emerging stronger on the other side.
Closing gaps in your environment is just one hurdle to clear to realize a resilient future. You need technology capable of seeing you through that hurdle and the next, no matter what they may look like or how big they are. Because while the threat landscape is going to keep getting more complex, your security solution shouldn’t be.
