Deep Instinct’s Voice of SecOps Report, now in its second iteration, takes the pulse of global SecOps professionals to deliver a comprehensive picture of the challenges and opportunities enterprises face as they work in unprecedented times. The second report of 2021 builds upon our original research from July, but includes a larger sample set, now summarizing the findings of 1,500 respondents across 11 countries.
The sample group geographies have been widened to include Australia and Japan, as well as additional European countries, including Spain, Italy, and Sweden. Our six core market verticals remain consistent: Financial Services, Retail, eCommerce, Manufacturing, and two of the most vulnerable industries: the Public Sector and Critical Infrastructure. Our research highlights the considerable differences in responses between geographies and verticals.
A wide range of topics were included in the study to obtain a comprehensive understanding of current issues and challenges. The biggest challenges SecOps professionals face pertain to the continued risks associated with moving to the cloud, the dangers of employees clicking on malicious links, and the changing threat landscape that now includes Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) and greater complexity in attack methods.
Respondents were also asked about the effects of the pandemic, with hybrid work environment concerns being explored, and the challenges of securing distributed networks. A deep dive into endpoint risks, in particular, elicited potentially alarming responses around comprehensive device coverage—or rather, lack thereof. Questions on the willingness to deploy additional agents to address gaps generated a nuanced series of responses.
The study also explores perceptions on the ability to prevent malware from infiltrating an organization’s network—both currently, as well as in a few years’ time. Perhaps many of the responses are reflective of a general state of pessimism around the capabilities of established technologies to cope with new threats.
The study also examines barriers to detecting more threats, and the significance of a huge volume of never-before-seen malware as major risk factor for SecOps teams. Unknown malware is a uniquely challenging problem and remains a consistent concern in both of our 2021 studies. A key question related to “speed to detect and respond;” Respondents were asked how long it took to respond to a security incident once a threat has been detected. Given the massive disruption to business continuity that follows a security breach, the lengthy global response times detailed in the study stand out as being far longer than most CEOs will tolerate.
Going forward, the publication of the bi-annual Voice of SecOps Report will be alternated with the bi-annual Deep Instinct Threat Report, an analysis of the latest attack vectors, ransomware families, and overall attack volumes as penned by our Threat Research team.
To read the full Voice of SecOps, 2nd Edition, download the infographic and full report.