Cyber complexity negatively impacts a company’s ability to respond to threats

71% of VPs and CIOs believe that the high number of cybersecurity tools they use negatively impacts their organization’s ability to detect and prevent threats, a Perimeter 81 report reveals.

Hybrid and remote work requiring a high number of cybersecurity tools

The research evaluated responses from 500 IT professionals at companies with 50 or more employees in the US. It covers new trends in the workforce due to COVID-19, how those changes have affected cybersecurity, and their impact on IT professionals.

“Hybrid and remote work is definitely here to stay,” says Amit Bareket, CEO of Perimeter 81. “A remarkable 87% of responding companies will have hybrid workers even after COVID—and more than half of them will work remotely three to four days a week. This is a dramatic development that permanently increases the size of the network’s attack surface, and requires IT professionals to quickly seek long-term solutions.”

“As cyberattacks evolve, many vendors have been trying to solve this ever-shifting problem with more solutions and more fences,” says Sagi Gidali, CPO at Perimeter 81.

“This has led to the painful and complex reality in which the average CISO is forced to manage dozens of cybersecurity solutions, which impedes their ability to secure and defend their networks. We call this problem the ‘Cyber Complexity Trap.’”

Additional findings

• 50% of companies with more than 1,000 employees use 20 or more cybersecurity tools and solutions
• 64% report that they experienced a significant cybersecurity incident in 2020-21, including ransomware or phishing
• 34% of companies have made cybersecurity a priority due to news coverage of cyber incidents
• 59% admitted they paid a ransom to cyber thieves
• 47% of cyberattack victims had recovery costs between $100,000 and $1 million

“One of the complexities rapid adoption to hybrid work has brought, stems from an organization’s growing SaaS app stack — environments that are dynamic, continuously updating, with a staggering amount of configurations for the CISO and security team to monitor and manage. Moreover, oftentimes the security team has no visibility at all to what is going on in the SaaS apps, as the SaaS admins sit outside the security team, in the department that predominantly uses that SaaS,” Maor Bin, CEO of Adaptive Shield, told Help Net Security.