Telstra, a telecommunications and technology company, has published research in partnership with Omdia, a research and advisory consultancy, exploring how companies are leveraging security technology for resilience and innovation in North Asia.
To determine the state of Security Operations (SecOps) in North Asia, Telstra surveyed 250 senior technology decision makers at the end of 2022 in collaboration with Omdia. The study measured the maturity of security automation across a variety of complex technological contexts and threats.
The objective of the survey was to learn how businesses protect themselves from threats through automation by examining the maturity of security automation throughout the technological stack and end-to-end threat management. The recently released whitepaper seeks to give security leaders the knowledge they need to strengthen their organizations’ cybersecurity resilience and assist their ongoing digital transformation programs.
According to Paul Abfalter, Head of North Asia at Telstra, enterprises have an opportunity to use automation to boost operational effectiveness and resolve known security events, freeing up operational employees to concentrate on higher risk threats. This may lessen employee burnout and improve the protection of important corporate assets.
Adam Etherington, Senior Principal Analyst for Digital Enterprise Services at OMDIA, said that security is becoming a growing concern, and a potential constraint to digital ambitions in the region. Security automation is vital to address this challenge.
“Leveraging automation in SecOps can enrich threat telemetry, unify toolsets, and harness AI/ML advancements to better protect, detect and respond to advanced persistent threats. However, technology alone won’t solve the problem. Third party expertise is critical to address people, process and tool impacts within each firm’s industry context, regulatory requirements, and corporate objectives,” Etherington.
Although many organizations are investing in extra cybersecurity platforms to combat escalating incidents and breaches, this has led to expansive toolsets that produce a higher amount of warnings and false positives.
According to the study, security professionals are having trouble keeping up with the large number of threat warnings, alarms, tickets, and possible incidents that are being produced by different security solutions.
Security teams are being overwhelmed by false positives as a result of a significant rise in the attack surface brought on by the integration of more operational technology (OT) devices with IT systems, a lack of device and patch management across older technologies, and a wide range of non-integrated toolkits.
“Security executives must continually assess their organizational cybersecurity resilience to support ongoing digital transformation, leverage the right cyber partner and unlock value from security tools. Reaching optimized automation can be a long journey. It is important to work with experienced and trusted specialists to discover the best adoption and operational model for your organization,” Paul Abfalter added.
