A study conducted by Endace and VIB has identified the economic, resourcing, and management challenges that large enterprises face in protecting (or not as the case may be) their networks.

Endace’s study, Challenges of managing and securing the network 2019, was conducted by independent, US-based research company, Virtual Intelligence Briefing (VIB), surveying senior executives and technical staff at more than 250 large enterprises globally.

The study was carried out to understand the challenges that these organisations face in protecting their networks from cyberattack and performance issues. 

Organisations from a range of industry verticals including finance, healthcare, insurance and retail participated in the study, which found that one of the biggest challenges for all organisations was a lack of agility, making it difficult for their teams to investigate and respond quickly and accurately to security threats or outages.

“96% of respondents indicated they have significant on-premise infrastructure to defend. Clearly, they have data governance and sovereignty responsibilities they can’t outsource,” said Stuart Wilson, CEO, Endace.

Respondents cited the need for greater visibility into network activity as one of their top issues: almost 90% of respondents rated having ‘insufficient visibility into network activity to be certain about what is happening’ as a significant challenge for their organisation.

Some of the key issues reported were:

• 81% of respondents reported not having enough monitoring tools in the right places on the network
• 80% rated ‘alert fatigue’ as a significant concern
• 76% reported that ‘tool fatigue’ is a significant issue
• 91% indicated ‘integrating solutions to streamline processes, increase productivity and reduce complexity’ is a significant challenge
• 90% reported slow, complex CAPEX purchasing cycles are reducing their flexibility in defending their organisations’ networks.

Tom Riddle, director, marketing and research Solutions at Virtual Intelligence Briefing said, “These research findings show that IT and security staff still lack adequate tools, efficient workflows and the agility necessary to investigate and respond to threats or issues quickly and accurately enough to keep their infrastructure safe and trouble-free.”

“This research shows organisations urgently need to streamline their approach to security to enable rapid and cost-effective deployment. Moving to a common, open analytics platform to host a range of security solutions is a key tactic for better security,” said Cary Wright, VP product management at Endace.