The Top 5 Cybersecurity Challenges — And What to Do About Them [Research]
What are the headwinds confronting teams that strive to build and maintain a strong cybersecurity posture at their organizations? Hundreds of IT and cybersecurity leaders just revealed their answers to that question in a new Foundry MarketPulse survey, conducted for BlackBerry.
The survey of more than four hundred decision-makers across multiple verticals in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. identifies several struggles in this area and offers insights into how we might collectively achieve greater success in meeting our cybersecurity goals.
Top Cybersecurity Challenges
Here are the top five roadblocks to achieving a consistently strong security posture, according to survey respondents:
- Cost — 83% of responding organizations say building cybersecurity programs is expensive due to required tools, licenses, and personnel.
- Talent— 80% agree it’s challenging to fill specialized security roles.
- Threat Landscape — 53% say evolving security threats challenge their preparedness.
- Complexity — 53% say the task of integrating new technology is a challenge.
- Teams — While most organizations say they have an incident management process, 49% say they lack the teams and tools for the process to be effective 24x7x365.
In addition to the above, more than three-in-four IT and cyber decision-makers currently report a lack of holistic visibility into their security posture.
More Organizations Adopting XDR
The Foundry MarketPulse survey for BlackBerry also surveyed experiences with extended detection and response (XDR), a cybersecurity approach that collects and analyzes data from multiple sources to predict, prevent, discover, and respond to cyberattacks around-the-clock.
Many organizations are moving in this direction to improve their security posture. Respondents shared multiple reasons for pursuing XDR strategies, citing that it achieves the following:
- Improves security to match a growing number of advanced attacks
- Integrates threat intelligence
- Reduces total cost and risk at the same time
Overall, the potential for improved protection, detection, and response is the most attractive benefit of XDR.
Yet, a significant number of IT decision makers also have concerns about whether they can successfully implement this approach. These worries center on staffing, scalability, and technology integrations. The concerns were most prevalent among leaders from small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).
XDR Solution Demands and How to Solve Them
BlackBerry Vice President of Cybersecurity Product Strategy Nathan Jenniges tracks the benefits and the challenges of XDR implementation.
“Strengthening cyber defenses and maintaining operation around-the-clock calls for businesses to make significant investments in sophisticated tools and highly skilled staff. Organizations often find their IT staff are stretched thin, or not skilled enough to manage security technologies,” says Jenniges.
One idea for how organizations can reap the benefits of implementing XDR, while avoiding its complexities and staffing demands, is to find a security vendor who offers managed XDR services.
“With 24x7 monitoring and mitigation, managed XDR could be the missing link — particularly for critical infrastructure organizations, which are greater targets for cyberattacks with potentially damaging results.”
Managed XDR acts as an extension of an organization’s internal security teams, Jenniges says, while eliminating gaps in coverage caused by staffing issues like weekends, holidays, and sickness.
"51% who plan to outsource XDR management are extremely confident in their ability to gain a return from XDR, as opposed to 35% managing XDR themselves," — Foundry MarketPulse Survey for BlackBerry.
Managed Services and Security Posture
The new research also found that 80% of responding organizations already use a managed service provider (MSP) for at least some of their cybersecurity workloads. These organizations report a long list of benefits from doing so. Similarly, those who indicated they are considering managed services — such as managed XDR — anticipate great benefits by partnering with a third-party security services provider.
The research contains a pleasant surprise for those seeking to uplevel their organization’s cyber capabilities: The top things on the benefits list for managed services address the biggest overall concerns. Specifically, the top advantages of managed services, according to the survey include: freeing up existing IT and cybersecurity resources (51%); addressing the cybersecurity skills gap (42%); and improving scalability (42%).
“The ability to free up existing IT and cybersecurity resources was both the top anticipated and experienced benefit,” — Foundry MarketPulse survey for BlackBerry.
Read the complete results of the BlackBerry cybersecurity posture survey, here.
Learn more about the BlackBerry® managed XDR service, CylanceGUARD® here.
About Gary Davis
Gary Davis is Chief Cybersecurity Advocate at BlackBerry.
