The cybersecurity landscape is in a state of constant change. As cloud adoption rises steadily, and hybrid work environments become the norm, threat actors continue to find new attack vectors and develop new ways to exploit vulnerabilities. Keeping malicious players away from organizations’ valuable resources has never been more challenging, and IT and security professionals are in a perpetual race to defend the perimeter.
In our latest State of Cybersecurity Report 2022, we took a close look at how today’s organizations address the evolving threat landscape as their workforce and data centers continuously grow beyond the traditional perimeter. We surveyed 500 US IT professionals in companies with between 50 to 1,000+ employees in a wide range of industries, and asked them about their current challenges, priorities, and motivators when it comes to cybersecurity.
Our research shed light on the cybersecurity risks that keep IT professionals up at night, and how they plan to address them moving forward. Here are the top insights that we share in the report, in the hopes of helping IT and security professionals continue to tighten up their network security strategies in 2023.
Our data shows that organization’s reliance on cloud and hybrid environments is higher than ever. Most companies – 92% – have already shifted at least half of their computing resources to the cloud, and only 8% still have the majority of their resources on-prem.
The move to the cloud requires organizations to update their network security tools and practices. Cloud-based security solutions allow the hybrid workforce to quickly connect to the organizational network, without having to backhaul traffic though physical data centers, which slows down performance and productivity.
Survey respondents put three cybersecurity challenges at the top of their list: data protection (67%), cloud security (65%), and data privacy (60%). This should come as no surprise as the number of attacks on organizational systems has grown considerably over the past few years. Survey results show that 67% of companies experienced serious cybersecurity incidents over the past year, costing them an average of $330,000 in damages. The most common threats are phishing attacks and security breaches.
As organizations’ reliance on public cloud technologies increases, along with their adoption of cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, the corporate tech environment has become more complex than ever before. It’s no wonder that protecting data, cloud security, and data privacy have become major challenges. The traditional tools and practices are no longer enough when it comes to securing the constantly-growing perimeter of today’s organizational tech-stack.
The top differentiators when searching for an advanced solution are service and support, ease of deployment, specific features, and breadth of functionality. These results highlight the need for an easy-to-use technology with strong support and a robust feature set. As investment in cybersecurity tools grow, it’s clear that organizations can’t afford to spend valuable time and resources deploying and configuring a solution that only addresses part of their needs.
When asked about reasons for change in technology spending, respondents put improved cybersecurity and more agile and flexible security technology at the top of their list. It’s clear that a key differentiator for IT professionals when choosing a cybersecurity tool is the ability to be agile. Companies are looking for network security solutions that address their top concerns and allow them to be secure, agile, and future-focused.
Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) technologies check all the boxes when it comes to addressing organizations’ cybersecurity needs – and many companies are well on their way to leveraging them. Our research results show that over half of the companies we surveyed are already planning to implement ZTNA in their organizations.
Applying Zero Trust least-privileged access and continuous verification strategies to network security helps IT and security professionals minimize their organizational attack surface, and get ahead of cloud and data protection security risks. An advanced, cloud-based ZTNA offering empowers network security pros with full visibility and control over who accesses the network. It allows them to segment their systems to prevent malicious players from achieving lateral movement, and protect valuable data and resources.
Perimeter 81 provides organizations with a robust, easy-to-use, cloud-based solution that enables effortless deployment and management. IT admins can then focus less on hardware maintenance and more on developing security policies, day-to-day monitoring, and threat responses.
Book a demo today to see how Perimeter 81 helps IT and security professionals address today’s top cybersecurity challenges head-on.
