The one constant in our interconnected world is change. Digital transformation is dominated by nebulous perimeters, distributed workforces, global connections, artificial- intelligence-driven decision-making and critical systems moving to the public cloud. It creates a never-ending flow of new features, approaches and business models which produces a nutritious petri dish ideal for misconfiguration and mishandling of these emerging technologies and new processes. Digital transformation also introduces risk into the ecosystem. Yet, this “leap before looking” approach dominates when business requirements force adoption as a means of survival.
Today, we are releasing a report that we commissioned 451 Research to create that reveals how the majority of organizations are well down the road with digital transformation strategies and confirms the unanimous adoption of cloud services. More than three-quarters of businesses leverage a hybrid IT environment with production workloads traversing integrated on-premises and cloud services. This includes storage and management of sensitive or regulated data in the public cloud.
It also exposes a unanimous confidence that businesses believe they are well positioned to protect their sensitive data, yet concede that the majority have experienced a significant security incident, cyberattack or data breach in the past 12 months. A key ingredient is the growing gap in security expertise and personnel. While the security staffing shortage is well-documented, what is less understood is how best to get the most out of finite resources within organizations. Like the contradiction around sensitive data protection, a similar paradox exists with security personnel requirements. There is near unanimous agreement among respondents who believe they have enough security personnel to support their organization. Yet more than three-quarters of these firms report their teams lack specific expertise in critical areas of cybersecurity including threat hunting, cloud security, security operations, automation and orchestration.
Enabling digital transformation will remain a top IT spending priority for the years to
come. Organizations are struggling to gain efficiencies, improve agility to keep pace with emerging technologies and threats, and scale to enable business objectives and enhance their customer experience. As the lines that once delineated information technology, industrial automation, development operations and consumer services blur, the need to synchronize digital transformation strategies with security programs becomes more acute. The people, processes and technologies of the cybersecurity stack must align to and enable business objectives. In an interconnected world of constant change, cybersecurity can no longer be an afterthought.
The full research report can be downloaded here: https://esentire.com/resource-library/451-research-report
