Tripwire recently conducted a series of surveys and interviews to understand IT professionals who manage security for their company. The cybersecurity landscape is constantly changing, new challenges are rapidly emerging, and new threats have surfaced, especially throughout the pandemic. We were curious to know some of the struggles that security professionals experience as a part of their job. We were especially interested in small to mid-size companies, entities which often don’t have the necessary budgets or resources to tackle cybersecurity threats.

Through our inquiries, we gained deeper insights about security budgets in different companies as well as insights into what security professionals are like as people, what concerns them, and what security initiatives they hope to achieve for their company. Here are some of our findings.

When It Comes to Security, Recommendations Are Key

When it comes to decisions about which security products to research, security professionals rely on product reviews offered by recognized blogs and articles. However, recommendations, whether from friends, colleagues, or known experts in the field, are also considered valuable. We also asked about the use of social media platforms for professional advancement such as reading articles, watching product demonstrations, and keeping up with industry news.

LinkedIn was the most used and trusted social media platform, while many respondents mentioned Gartner as the first step in researching what security solutions they should be thinking about.

“Sometimes I just go to LinkedIn. My friends might be using another security company and then I will check it out. Aside from LinkedIn, checking on Gartner is the easiest way to go. Gartner reviews what is the best event management, what next best firewall is, etc. Gartner gives a very extensive reviews of these types of products. And friends’ recommendations when I meet them.” Security analyst in a mid-size (Read more...)