CISOs are so overburdened by cybersecurity pressures that many are now simply ‘giving up’, according to a survey by a tech firm. During the RSA Conference 2020, Cisco published its sixth annual CISO Benchmark Report surveying the security posture of 2,800 IT security people from 13 countries.
IT security people are are increasing spending on automation to simplify and speed up response times in their security ecosystems; using cloud security to improve visibility into their networks; and sustaining collaboration between networking, endpoint and security teams, according to the survey. Some 42pc of respondents are suffering from cybersecurity fatigue, defined as virtually giving up on proactively defending against malicious actors. Of those fatigue sufferers, near all, 96pc, are saying that managing a multi-vendor environment is challenging, complexity being the main causes of burnout. The report suggests that those who have established clear security outcome objectives or metrics were less likely to experience cyber fatigue.
More than half (52 percent) of respondents stated mobile devices are now very or extremely challenging to defend. While some said that data centres, or applications, are most difficult to defend, the most troublesome place to defend data was named as the public cloud, with a majority, 52 percent finding it very or extremely challenging to secure, and 50pc describing private cloud infrastructure as a top security challenge. That said, most, 86pc of respondents said that using cloud security increased visibility into their networks.
Steve Martino, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer at Cisco said: “As organisations increasingly embrace digital transformation, CISOs are placing higher priority in adopting new security technologies to reduce exposure against malicious actors and threats. Often, many of these solutions don’t integrate, creating substantial complexity in managing their security environment. To address this issue, security professionals will continue steady movement towards vendor consolidation, while increasing reliance on cloud security and automation to strengthen their security posture and reduce the risk of breaches.”
For more from Martino, see his blog on the Cisco website.
