Over 50% of UAE cybersecurity professionals ‘overwhelmed’ by scale of threats
What is working against them is their dependence on ‘siloed security’, says Trellix study
Dubai: A constant battle when it comes to cyber threats is forcing a majority of UAE’s cybersecurity professionals to feel ‘overwhelmed’. This despite increased commitments from management and access to bigger budgets, according to findings from Trellix.
Some 57 per cent of UAE-based respondents said their current security model needed to be updated to predict, detect, and respond to attacks as they happened. Among those expressing such concerns, 13 per cent described the necessary updates as ‘major’.
Beyond taking a toll on the cybersecurity professionals — 54 per cent of respondents cited being held back by the limitations of their cybersecurity infrastructure as one of their biggest work frustrations — this gap in cybersecurity is impacting UAE entities’ bottom-lines, with 80 per cent of respondents acknowledging that the organisation lost up to 10 per cent of revenue in the previous year because of security breaches.
Siloed security
According to the findings, 60 per cent of UAE SecOps teams are hampered by patchworks of security solutions that have few, if any, integration options. Only one in nine (11 per cent) have managed to eliminate silos and little more than a fifth (22 per cent) are working towards this end.
Some 59 per cent of surveyed professionals are working with more than 10 separate security solutions, and 60 per cent decried the lack of efficiency this causes. One-third of organisations have no plans to rid themselves of silos.
“Siloed security systems hand easy victories to threat actors and make life harder for SecOps teams everywhere,” said Vibin Shaju, General Manager - UAE at Trellix. “And yet many businesses seem prepared to accept siloed security rather than updating their security architecture to connect the dots and enable adaptive security. Nothing changes if nothing changes.”