Coronavirus Concerns: Security Teams Scattered, Enterprises Vulnerable
Throughout the past eight weeks, security teams, like many enterprise teams, have found themselves scattered as their organizations rapidly switched to remote work. And, in the transition, many security professionals have found themselves reassigned away from security tasks to other projects. It’s hard to see how these changes haven’t increased enterprise data and system risks.
“The move to remote working exposes many new vulnerabilities for organizations. Sensitive data may now be traversing unsecured networks, accessed by uncontrolled and unsecured devices,” said Cary Wright, VP of product management at Endace. “A new chaos ensues for the IT teams as they try to understand how information flows through their enterprises.”
Bob Layton, chief revenue officer at Digital Defense Inc., argues enterprise security risks are increasing as the move to home offices also increases the overall enterprise attack surface. “Most corporate IT users are not road warriors and their desktops, laptops, mobile devices, applications and network access were not designed to securely operate outside the corporate office,” he said.
The biggest risks to come from these changes, Layton said, include ungoverned personal device use and the lack of corporate use policy being enforced. “The rush to get users online without a rigorous IT use policy or plan for security is opening lots of back doors to corporate networks,” he noted. “Keeping everyone working at any cost has the potential to push security aside—hopefully only briefly.”
Security spending, on the heels of a strong 2019, is still forecast to grow, but at a much-reduced rate this year.
“The economic crisis and business uncertainty resulting from the coronavirus pandemic is likely to result in a contraction of cybersecurity expenditure in 2020 before a return to positive growth in 2021,” according to a new report by Westlands Advisory. The global market for cybersecurity technologies and services grew to $128.6 billion in 2019 from $115.4 billion in 2018. The firm currently forecasts that the market will grow at a slower average rate of 6.2% per year to 2023 due to the economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.
Decreased Focus, Increased Risk
The scattering of security teams and of their focus could be taking their toll. According to a recent ISC2 Cybersecurity Pulse Survey, 23% of respondents said they have seen an increase in security incidents in their organization, while 47% of respondents said they have been reassigned from security tasks to IT tasks.
“Headcount reductions for security teams will result in less critical alerts and events being adequately investigated. If cuts to headcount must be made, then they must be offset with productivity increases for security analysts,” Endace’s Wright said. “This can only be done with workflow integrations between tools, automation and accurate data to make decisions quickly and confidently. Integrating network history recording into the security tool suite is an important component to balancing any headcount reductions. The remaining staff needs to be able to act swiftly and confidently when alerts are raised.”
It’s easy to become fixated on the challenges that come with disruption and uncertainty, noted Bill Ruckelshaus, CFO at ExtraHop. “Leaders should position the organization toward resilience, asking questions like, what measures are in place to act quickly in the event of a breach? How will the organization recover?” he said.
To mitigate risks, Ruckelshaus recommends organizations focus on one of their greatest assets: people. “It’s vital for your IT and security teams to share information and work together to face these challenges,” he said. “For example, teams traditionally focused on one domain, like end-user experience or security, may benefit from the visibility and expertise of each other to troubleshoot and triage remote access issues.”
That’s certainly good advice and will remain so for some time as security teams are stretched doing more with less.