Protecting Your

Information security is often described as a constantly accelerating treadmill: Cyber adversaries advance their attack methods and security vendors ramp up their countermeasures. In the meantime, security professionals are expected to keep up with developments on both sides and understand the ramifications of these changes for their organization’s information security policies, procedures, and controls. When taking into consideration the proliferation of malware and the challenges brought on by BYOD, it is no surprise that security professionals arare finding it more difficult to protect their networks than ever before. Network security also grows more cumbersome as new users, applications, and devices add network traffic and threat vectors to corporate LANs and WANs.

IT initiatives are being adopted without the proper network security oversight or controls in place.

Network security policies and controls are not cohesive because they must be implemented across many different security and networking technologies.

Too many overlapping controls and processes tend to cause problems.

Security staff is too busy responding to alerts/events and not enough time is spent on training, planning, or network security strategy.

Security policies are too complex and can’t be enforced withcurrent network security processes and controls.

Support for mobile computing initiatives

Need for network security to be more flexible to support dynamic business processes

Support for cloud computing initiatives

reside in the informationsecurity group

Increasing user mobility and the need for remote access to the corporate LAN

Increasing use of mobile devices and/or BYOD initiatives

Belief that network access controls can help lower IT risk

of surveyed professionals say network security has become more difficult over the last 2 years

Network Security Isn’t Getting Any Easier

Five Most Commonly Identified Network Security Challenges

Key Factors that are Shaping Organizations’ Network Security Strategies

Employment of Network Security Architects

Factors Driving Organizations to Use Network Access Controls

Network

79%

of organizations surveyed employ staff that could be considered network security architects

Network security is an evolving challenge, and vendors are working with security professionals to address cyber risk and improve incident detection and response. While prescriptive fixes vary widely by organization, professionals can leverage innovative products such as network access controls, next-generation firewalls, network-based anti-malware solutions, and integrated threat intelligence offerings to improve their security. Organizations should look to these technologies for creative enhancements to their security architectures. Security pSecurity professionals need help, and automating security processes, addressing skills gaps, and integrating disparate security tools can help them address their network security shortcomings. 

The Bigger Truth

Source: ESG Research Report, Network Security Trends in the Era of Cloud and Mobile Computing, August 2014.

Of those 67%

43% reside in the networking group24%

67%

Preventing/detecting malware threats

52%

Need for an integrated network security architecture featuring central command and control and distributed policy enforcement

48%

46%

43%

42%

42%

43%

43%

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