Is Enterprise Security Being Weighed Down by Point Solutions?

April 5th, 2016

The cybersecurity industry is bubbling with new technologies that go after the threat du jour. The threat landscape has evolved, and cyber risk from organized crime and nation states represent a clear and present danger. The impact on enterprise security is severe. Our security is only as good as our ability to coherently and consistently put up a solid defense.

Once upon a time, security was simple: you had a corporate network with a defined perimeter. Throw up some firewalls at the endpoints, and you could pretty much weather any cyberattack at the time. Then came mobility and the Cloud, and securing this modern network was no longer simple. Businesses were exposed by security holes they didn’t even know existed. Sophisticated attackers were able to blow right past legacy security appliances. The need to address the widening gap between defenders and attackers, along with the risk of facing a breach, initiated a “security arms race.”

Gartner estimates that worldwide spending on information security reached over $75 billion in 2015, continuing a pattern of increases. And at the annual RSA conference last month, there were over 500 exhibitors all vying for a piece of that pie. But therein lies the problem: how is one expected to make sense of all these various point solutions on the market and organize them?  This explosion of point solutions contributes to network complexity and challenges short-handed IT teams to protect their networks in a manageable way.