Survey shows 61% of IT decision-makers cite blind spots as a major obstacle for data protection

Gigamon Inc, an industry provider of traffic visibility solutions, has released the results of a commissioned survey, “Hide and Seek: Cybersecurity and the Cloud,” conducted by Vanson Bourne, an independent market research company.

The survey polled information technology (IT) and security decision-makers in the U.K., Germany and France about their cloud security preparedness, network visibility issues and EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) readiness. All percentages here reflect survey results from the U.K. respondents.

The results of this survey demonstrate that lack of visibility is leaving organisations struggling to identify network data and investigate suspicious network activity tied to malicious attacks. 61% of respondents cited network “blind spots” as a major obstacle to effective data protection while 41% of those, who do not have complete visibility of their network, reported that they lacked sufficient information to identify threats.

Survey findings pinpoint three root causes of data blindness that are posing network security risks:

• • The increasing speed and growth of network traffic stresses monitoring and security tools, which are not adept at handling large amounts of traffic – Sin all, 67% of respondents report that they have not scaled their monitoring and security infrastructure to meet the needs of increased data volume.
• • High value information is being migrated to the cloud, where security is limited and application data is not easily accessible – A total of 88% of respondents believe that cloud security is a concern holding their organisation back from adopting the latest technologies. When asked what types of information they are moving to the cloud, 68% of respondents reported day-to-day work information and 39% cited critical and proprietary corporate information.
  • A large amount of network data remains hidden due to data and tools still being segmented by organisational boundaries – IT and security decision-makers are not able to quickly identify and address threats and security events. 70% of respondents report that because different network data is being utilised between NetOps and SecOps teams, there is no consistent way of accessing it nor understanding it. 45% of respondents, who do not have complete visibility over their network, report they did not possess information on what is being encrypted in the network.

Network blind spots go hand-in-hand with the lack of readiness for GDPR. 67% of respondents agree that lack of visibility over data makes GDPR difficult. 58% report they do not have a robust GDPR strategy in place with U.K. respondents stating that they have dedicated 20% of their IT budget, on average, for GDPR. The lack of GDPR readiness may be a cause for concern as the regulations come into effect May 2018 with heavy fines issued for non-compliance.

“Today’s attackers have the advantage as cybercrime is a thriving economy and attacks are focused on infiltrating the network and stealing important company information,” said Ananda Rajagopal, vice president of products at Gigamon.

“More worrisome is how this will impact U.K. organisations’ ability to comply with GDPR requirements. It is imperative for enterprises to adopt a visibility platform that provides visibility and control of their network traffic, and one that’s integrated with their security tools to accelerate threat detection and improve efficiencies.”

The Gigamon Visibility Platform directly addresses network blind spots by offering:

• • The most scalable visibility platform with up to 800Gbps of processing capability per node and up to 25.6Tbps when clustered, to meet the latest demands of the network.
• • Cross-architecture deployments on premises, in remote offices and in the cloud to securely migrate high-value information to public clouds.
• • An end to siloed data and tools that are segmented. Monitoring and security tools access the same data, encrypted or not, so that network and security operators can consistently access and understand what matters.

Gigamon solves data blindness by providing security and network operations teams with the pervasive visibility and control to automate and accelerate threat detection for securing enterprises and hybrid clouds. Learn more about our Gigamon Visibility Platform and Gigamon Visibility Platform for AWS.

The independent survey was commissioned by Gigamon and administered by Vanson Bourne in May 2017. Respondents consisted of 500 IT and security decision-makers of organisations with over 1,000 employees. The regional representation of respondents includes 200 respondents in the U.S. and 100 respondents each in the U.K., France and Germany.

Comment on this article below or via Twitter: @ VanillaPlus OR @jcvplus