Nearly half of organizations lack the necessary talent to maintain security measures
Regardless of their size, organizations share a common challenge: IT security teams are understaffed and overextended.
The number of security alerts, the challenge of what to prioritize, and the shortage of expertise can be overwhelming and introduce risk.
The Trend Micro research – which surveyed 1,125 IT decision makers across the globe – shows that 69 percent of organizations agree that automating cybersecurity tasks using Artificial Intelligence (AI) would reduce the impact from the lack of security talent. This comes after 64 percent of organizations experienced increased cyber threats in the last year.
“There’s a real and critical shortage of cybersecurity people. But there’s a fix for it today,” said Greg Young, vice president for cybersecurity at Trend Micro commented.
“AI and machine learning can reduce the workload today on the people we have, by handling the low value tasks we currently use our high value people for. Next is lowering the tsunami of low value alerts we throw at teams. More security products adding more alerts is not helpful, instead when we add smarter and integrated security it should have more intelligence and be better integrated, ideally reducing junk alerts. More security data collected doesn’t have to mean more alerts, that data should be used to weed out the false alarms. Let staff focus on the real and complex attacks. Satisfying work is a staff retention element in this tight cybersecurity people market.”
From the survey, 63 percent of IT decision makers plan to leverage AI technology to automate their security processes. However, while AI can effectively handle data processing, trained cybersecurity professionals are needed to analyze the results and manage the overall security strategy.
According to Gartner, “The shortage of skilled security professionals has been a perennial problem that consistently results in failed security technology deployments. The number of unfilled cybersecurity roles is expected to grow from 1 million in 2018 to 1.5 million by the end of 2020.”
The Gartner report continues, “Most organizations are struggling to fill the open positions they have, let alone retain skilled staff. Managed detection and response (MDR) services are filling the need of organizations of all sizes that lack internal security resources and expertise, and want to expand their investments beyond preventive security technologies to address their detection, response and 24/7 monitoring gaps.”