Survey Reports 83% of Companies Suffer Crippling Business Damage During the First 24 Hours of an IT Outage

Netenrich finds that security professionals remain hostage to legacy SecOps while aspiring towards proactive, risk-driven modern security

Netenrich, a Resolution Intelligence company, released “Pivoting to Risk-Driven Security Operations,” a global survey of IT and security professionals. The survey found that 83% of companies would suffer business damage during the first 24 hours of an outage and thereafter, which comes as no surprise with recent surges in ransomware and other attacks wreaking havoc across IT infrastructures. The survey also revealed interesting findings and contradictions when it comes to scaling security operations:

• When looking to upgrade their security posture, 67% focused on tool upgrades yet organizations found that tool integrations (55%), lack of tool expertise (52%) and tool sprawl (41%) were their biggest pain points.
• While security teams aspire to do more proactive and risk-driven operations, like risk management (37%), incident analysis (34%), threat modeling (29%), they spend most of their time doing foundational and reactive security tasks, like updating patches (43%), researching and analyzing critical incidents (41%) and removing false positives (40%).

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Security teams are trapped doing the same thing they have been doing for years – reactive security. They’re adding more tools, needing more resources and chasing thousands of alerts while lacking the contextual data and prioritization that’s highly needed.

 

“Organizations fail to shift to a proactive approach that prioritizes security defenses around the most likely, highest business-impacting attack vectors,” said John Bambenek, Primary Threat Researcher at Netenrich. “Security teams need to start evaluating business risk based on the likelihood of attack success and mapping that attack success to what it would actually cost the business. Focus on the critical issues that matter most to reduce the attack and outage impact.”

The survey finds that companies want to do more threat modeling, incident analysis and risk management, however, very few employ it or even know how:

• Less than 40% perform threat modeling.
• Less than half conduct threat modeling on a daily (16%) or weekly basis (31%).
• Only 30% practice external attack surface management.

“Our industry has taken an IT internal view to security rather than an attack external view of security,” adds Bambenek. “Organizations need to shift mindsets, adopt a managed risk, not an IT-based approach. Security operations needs to be data-driven and predictive where continuous threat modeling runs at its core. This is where companies like Netenrich can help.”

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Administered by Dimensional Research, a total of 333 qualified global IT and security professionals participated in the survey and carried enterprise security responsibilities at medium to enterprise-sized companies. Other key findings from the report include:

• 80% of companies have 30% or less of their IT budget dedicated to security.
• Companies experienced minimal security budget increases despite growing IT demands as a result of remote work shifts and COVID impact: 19% reported no increases to security budgets, 29% received less than 10% budget and 8% received 50% or more budget increase.
• Companies looked to MSPs to augment their security operations: 47% rely on managed services to run their ops entirely or in hybrid arrangements.
• MSPs have an opportunity to expand their services by offering advanced, risk-based security and threat modeling services: only 17% of MSPs are offering threat modeling.

Netenrich enables global enterprises to be more business resilient, agile and responsive to fast changing network, cloud and security environments. Our solutions eliminate the endless noise, IT complexities and integration issues – shifting companies to a modern digital operations approach. We automate the daily grunt work of legacy operations to consolidate across tools, data and applications, to gain contextual insights so IT pros can prioritize and resolve issues faster. Our Resolution Intelligence platform enables your ITOps, DevOps and SecOps teams to predict, analyze and solve issues quickly with security, uptime and scale. More than 6,000 customers and organizations worldwide rely on Netenrich. The company is based in San Jose, CA.

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[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]