Organizations Challenged By Insufficient IT Visibility, Staffing, Ponemon Findings Reveal

Among key findings from this week’s Ponemon Institute report “Gaps in Resources, Risk and Visibility Weaken Cybersecurity Posture” are: 68% of respondents feel that staffing is not adequate for a strong cybersecurity posture; 60% are challenged by insufficient visibility across IT asset types and esp. unmanaged assets, and 61% report inadequate context on the business impact if a vulnerable asset got breached.

Experts Comments below:

George Wrenn, CEO at CyberSaint Security:

“In today’s highly complex cybersecurity risk landscape, giving all business stakeholders useful infosec program information to inform decision making at the highest levels is the means to building resiliency with a top-down approach. Visibility is everything, yet the legacy systems we have in place today to measure program success aren’t meeting the needs of the modern enterprise.

“Quantifying and linking risks to business impact has been a need in the information security community and has especially grown over the last few years, as business leaders know the importance of protecting their critical assets and customer data. In the wake of breaches such as Equifax, Target, and others that led to business impact whether reputational or financial, Boards of Directors, CEOs and CFOs need visibility in to their cybersecurity posture. This can only be achieved through integrated risk management program that at its foundation uses financial metrics, risk quantification, simplification, and automation to communicate to any stakeholder. The business impact of a myriad of breach possibilities for the business should be clear and visible, so that security teams can mitigate those risks faster, and with more agility.”

Franklyn Jones, CMO at Cequence:

“The skills gap in cybersecurity is likely to be an ongoing problem with potentially millions of unfilled positions over the next few years. For that reason, IT organizations need to consider augmenting their staff with security tools that use advanced automation like machine learning and behavioral analysis. These types of tools can assist understaffed, overworked security teams in the discovery, analysis, and mitigation of potential breaches to their networks.”

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