As Security Budgets Cool, CISO’s Warm Up to New Ideas

Security spending is losing momentum with a third of CISOs reporting flat or reduced budgets this year. These numbers come from a recent annual survey of 755 cybersecurity decision-makers conducted by IANS Research. Decreased spending in the face of growing cyberattacks put pressure on security leaders to find better ways to optimize their processes. Fortunately, CISOs are discovering solutions for this problem by following the tried-and-true tactics of simplification, consolidation, and innovation.

Simplification

Security layers tend to build up in an enterprise as time goes on. It is quite likely the person who built your organization's original security stack left the company long ago. Their replacement added new layers to the security stack to address threats arising during their term. Three or four security leaders later your organization is wrestling with countless security tools and processes that no one fully understands. This understandable series of events ultimately leads to a mountain of inefficiencies.

It is quite likely that your organization has multiple security tools covering the same problem. In fact, an IBM report found the average enterprise uses 45 security solutions, and that those using over 50 see a decrease in effectiveness. This is why adopting new security tools every time a new attack method appears is a mistake - the law of diminishing returns. CISOs can streamline operations by performing a full audit of the security stack and removing tools that are outdated or duplicate the work of others.

Consolidation

One side-effect of security tool bloat is an increased need for professionals who can use and understand them. In other words, the more specialized tooling your environment uses, the more specialists you need to be effective. This inefficiency can be addressed by consolidating information from multiple tools into a single interface. For example, if you have five security analysts monitoring 45 tools (nine apiece), you can greatly improve matters by aggregating this security data in a single place.

Suppose you could send a third of the telemetry of your security stack to a single interface. In our example, your five analysts would go from having to monitor 45 tools to 31. This change alone would free up the labor of 1.5 employees. Now, imagine if you could send the telemetry of all your security tools to a single interface. The improvements to efficiency would be enormous.

Such a change is possible by using an API-first platform that specializes in aggregating security data. By communicating with security tools via API, a platform can collect telemetry from multiple sources and save that information in a common data format. This allows the platform to present a wealth of security data in a single interface, and drastically reduces the workload on your security team. Telemetry consolidation is a key feature of the SecOps Cloud Platform, which brings several benefits of cloud computing to the security space.

Innovation

The idiom “necessity is the mother of invention” directly applies to countless advancements in cybersecurity and the tech sector in general. Right now, we’re seeing budgetary constraints on CISOs during in time of rising cyberthreats - a perfect catalyst for driving new innovations. However, it is extremely rare for revolutionary and transformative ideas to come out of nowhere. Most often, innovations are built upon great ideas of past thinkers who solved problems in creative ways.

For example, running an IT shop or software development company used to be quite expensive. Businesses would often have to build and manage their own data centers, in-house applications, complex networks, and related infrastructure. This all changed with the era of cloud computing, which offered organizations inexpensive storage, improved collaboration, and faster time to market. More importantly, cloud computing allowed businesses to pay for precisely the amount of resources they needed, and quickly retire those they did not.

Cybersecurity has been slow to fully capitalize on the massive advantages of cloud computing, but it is catching up now. In addition to consolidating security telemetry into a single interface, the SecOps Cloud Platform offers critical scalability to security providers. Simply put, with the SecOps Cloud Platform an organization can pay for the security services it needs, and spin down those it does not. This lets organizations break free of vendor lock-in, and the inefficiencies of long-term contracts.

Staying Agile

Adaptability is the key to thriving in a swiftly-changing environment. Long term vendor lock-in and one-size-fits-all solutions make little sense in a world where threat actors change targets and techniques by the millisecond. Likewise, taking a band-aid approach to emerging security issues will inevitably lead to tool-bloat and employee burnout. Adopting a security platform that scales with your security team’s needs gives them the agility critical for protecting your organization.

If you are interested in learning more about how API-based security can optimize your current security processes, book a demo with our team.