{"id":34335,"date":"2019-10-15T09:46:33","date_gmt":"2019-10-15T08:46:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/?p=34335"},"modified":"2019-10-15T14:26:13","modified_gmt":"2019-10-15T13:26:13","slug":"one-tool-too-many-pulse-secure-expert-on-getting-past-the-tool-glut-of-the-modern-enterprise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/2019\/10\/15\/one-tool-too-many-pulse-secure-expert-on-getting-past-the-tool-glut-of-the-modern-enterprise\/","title":{"rendered":"Pulse Secure expert on getting past the tool glut of the modern enterprise"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Research has revealed that the average organisation uses multiple tools to handle VPNS, MFA, NAC, NGFW, MDM and more. But do we really need of all them? Scott Gordon, (CISSP) CMO, Pulse Secure, explores how the ‘tool sprawl’ is fast becoming a problem for companies and how in this case, more security tools does not mean better security <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It all looks like a bit of a mess. A new IDG survey has revealed that the average organisation uses nearly three tools to handle secure access capabilities including VPNs, MFA, NAC, NGFW, MDM and more. It\u2019s most pronounced in the medical and pharmaceutical industries which on average use three tools for each category. High tech and manufacturing use 2.8 tools and finance, banking, insurance and investment all use 2.6.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of this boils down to wasted time and\nmoney. Buying licences for products which effectively do the same thing, more administration,\nrifling through data to clear duplicate entries, blame games; these are the\nreal world business problems that it seems most businesses are now dealing\nwith. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But tool sprawl means more than just wasted\nresources – it means that a security outlook is less consistent, spottier,\nhobbles visibility and auditing, complicates the lives of users and\nadministrators and delays threat response. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This matters especially when we consider how\nIT is changing. Increasingly enterprise environments are hybrid and diverse with\nthe IDG survey revealing that most enterprises now distribute themselves among\nmultiple clouds as well as the data\ncentre. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those cloud services often come with their own\ntools, which may duplicate but cannot fully integrate consistently across\nprivate cloud, public cloud and the data centre. This can create problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of this merely creates more noise and more false positives for a security team. Commonly, such teams deal with thousands of alerts a day – a Ponemon Institute survey from earlier this year revealed that security teams spend 25% of their time pursuing false positives. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Furthermore, more tools means a wider attack\nsurface. When an enterprise uses more tools than they need to, they\u2019re handling\nmore data than they need to and providing attacks with more places to hit and\nmore loot to run off with. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whether it was to address a new threat, take\nadvantage of new features, fulfil new compliance requirements, whether\nindividual departments could purchase freely or companies were acquired along\nwith their tools – it\u2019s clear that there is a smorgasbord of redundant tools.\nSo how did we get here? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tool sprawl can largely be attributed to the cybersecurity boom. As cybersecurity has quickly become an enterprise-wide concern, enterprise budgets have ballooned over a relatively short period of time. In turn that has led to massively increased investment into the industry. Gartner reported last year that worldwide security spending grew by 12% in 2018, and projected it to grow by another 8% this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So we have a superfluity of vendors selling a tonne of products, many of which do the same thing. Those large budgets have allowed enterprises to purchase without much thought as to whether those purchases are efficient. It\u2019s of no surprise that this affects larger companies more – they\u2019re weighed down by 30% more tools than their smaller counterparts. In fact, companies with over 20,000 staff use over five tools for cloud access security. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other potential explanation is the\narbitrary separation between ITOps and SecOps that so often dogs enterprise\nsecurity. While they often use data and tools which do the same thing and serve\nthe same purpose, they\u2019re geared towards the specific use of the individual\ndepartments who often speak different technical languages, use different UIs\nand rarely communicate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The good news is that enterprises are not happy with this situation. The IDG report further elaborates that 48% of respondents are open to reducing the amount of tools they use. Quite naturally, they want to smooth out inconsistencies and streamline their own environments.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, 39% of IDG survey respondents listed enabling access control consistency across their hybrid IT environments. Another ESG research paper<\/a> shows that 66% of businesses are actively working towards consolidating their security portfolio. Understandably so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So how do we do that? Again, IDG respondents were on the right track. Many are considering using integrated platforms, suites and Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs). The IDG report added that 38% of respondents are outsourcing Secure Access capacity and that they plan to increase using MSSPs by 2021 by over 8%. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Enterprises should look at their secure access tools and decide which ones they really need, and which have become redundant since purchase. A total of 39% would like VPN as a central part of any secure access platform, 38% said multi-factor authentication and 37% favour Network Access Control, cloud security access brokering and web application firewalls. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tools can be consolidated in other ways too.\nUsing fewer vendors or vendors whose tools can easily be integrated with one\nanother could be a good idea. Integrating teams so that they\u2019re working\ntogether as opposed to side by side will be of great help here. Tool sprawl is\noften caused by arbitrarily separated teams which often share functions and\ndata, but rarely collaborate. Especially when it comes to visibility, such a\nseparation creates blind spots wherein ITOps\nsee insecure behaviour and don\u2019t recognise it as a threat and SecOps are often robbed of the necessary insight. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cybersecurity boom has led many to eagerly\noversubscribe to as many tools as possible. We\u2019re starting to understand that\nit may not be the best way forward leading to patchy security stances,\ninconsistent policies across the enterprise and a mounting burden of time and\ncost.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Research has revealed that the average organisation uses multiple tools to handle VPNS, MFA, NAC, NGFW, MDM and more. But do we really need of all them? Scott Gordon, (CISSP) CMO, Pulse Secure, explores how the ‘tool sprawl’ is fast becoming a problem for companies and how in this case, more security tools does not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":17691,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,1489,13207,93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-enterprise-security","category-insights","category-thought-leadership","category-top-stories"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34335"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34335\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34341,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34335\/revisions\/34341"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}