ESG recently surveyed 412 cybersecurity and IT professionals asking a number of questions about their organization’s security analytics and operations. Overall, security operations are quite difficult, many organizations complain about too many manual processes, too many disconnected point tools, and a real shortage of the right skills. These issues can lead to lengthy incident detection and response cycles or worse yet, damaging data breaches. Just ask Equifax.
The data indicates that organizations know they have problems and are willing to address them. For example, 33% say that their spending on security operations will increase significantly while another 49% indicate that their security operations spending will increase somewhat.
While security operations spending will increase, however, it’s worth noting that 30% of cybersec pros say that their biggest security operations challenge is the total cost of ownership. What does this mean? CISOs are willingly spending millions of dollars on security operations but getting marginal security efficacy and poor operational efficiency.
As the ESG data points out, business executives are more than willing to throw money at security operations problems, but they will demand that CISOs present them with all types of metrics demonstrating that increased investment is actually leading to improved results like improving the time needed for incident detection and response.
Bolstering these metrics won’t be easy but, based upon ESG research, CISOs can make progress by:
As CISOs move forward with these initiatives, they should continuously determine how to measure and report incremental and ongoing advancement they achieve with risk management, security efficacy, and operational efficiency. Successful CISOs will be the ones who can demonstrate and communicate real and honest progress anytime they are asked to do so.
Jon Oltsik is an ESG senior principal analyst and the founder of the firm’s cybersecurity service. Read more ESG blogs here.
