IT and security teams increasingly united in battle against sophisticated cyberthreats

New report from Commvault and Futurum shows organisations rallying around AI to counter AI-driven threats in 2024.

Commvault, a leading provider of cyber resilience and data protection solutions for hybrid cloud organisations, has released a new report that found the traditional silos between ITOps and security teams are beginning to break down, as organisations realise the importance of increased collaboration to combat the onslaught of more sophisticated cyber attacks.  

Commissioned in partnership with The Futurum Group, the report Overcoming Data Protection Fragmentation for Cyber-Resiliency surveyed over 200 C-Suite and senior-level IT executives (more than half of which were CIOs, CSOs and CISOs) in the Americas, EMEA and Asia-Pacific regarding their cyber resilience positions.  

According to the report, nearly all (99%) respondents indicated that the relationship between ITOps and security has grown more connected over the past 12 months. For those who described the relationship between ITOps and security as “connected,” 64% stated they now have shared goals for maintaining the company’s security and 70% stated they have joint processes and procedures in place for daily operations.

However, there is still work to do. For example, only 48% stated they have established joint processes and procedures in place to mitigate or recover from an incident.  

“Synergies between ITOps, security teams and the C-suite has never been more crucial as cyber criminals are deploying more sophisticated attacks powered by AI,” said Javier Dominguez, Chief Information Security Officer, Commvault. “But, with 19 cyber attacks every second, breaches are inevitable. It’s critical that ITOps and security teams jointly think about recovery as part of an end-to-end security practice tied to the NIST framework.”  

Using AI to advance security  

AI is expected to be a major theme in 2024 with more than two-thirds (68%) of respondents indicating the technology will boost their security efforts by identifying and responding to threats more quickly and accurately. Respondents identified several ways AI could improve their organisation’s security posture, including:  

• Augmenting and automating employee training and security awareness (67%) 
• Increasing efficiency by automating day-to-day operational processes associated with data protection (66%) 
• Augmenting user authentication and access control (57%) 
• Augmenting compliance monitoring and reporting (52%) 

Data fragmentation creates cyber resilience challenges  

Organisations continue to grapple with fragmented data protection solutions, which not only creates management complexities but cyber resilience challenges. More than 90% of respondents say fragmentation of data protection tools has a direct, negative impact on their organisation’s cyber resiliency and 54% indicated that fragmentation hinders their organisation’s cyber resiliency efforts.  

“Utilising a host of fragmented data protection products can drive up costs, create management nightmares, give bad actors more avenues to exploit and slow down recovery,” said Krista Macomber, Research Director, The Futurum Group. “This research serves as a good reminder that organisations should consider a modern platform that can reduce fragmentation, protect a vast array of workloads across any location, predict threats faster and speed up response and recovery times.”