Security News > 2021 > March > 80% of senior IT leaders see cybersecurity protection deficits
Nearly 80% of senior IT and IT security leaders believe their organizations lack sufficient protection against cyberattacks despite increased IT security investments made in 2020 to deal with distributed IT and work-from-home challenges, according to a new IDG survey commissioned by Insight Enterprises.
The survey examined the impact of the distributed IT landscape and pandemic-related transition to a remote workforce on IT security, including shifts in modernization priorities, projects undertaken in 2020 and major obstacles faced in strengthening cybersecurity defenses.
68% initiated projects to integrate incident response into companywide business continuity plans, 61% are integrating cybersecurity into infrastructure and DevOps decisions and 59% are incorporating IT security into broader business operations decisions to better combat cyber threats.
Most companies pursued multiple projects in categories including threat visibility/identification, incident response, network security, endpoint security, application security, malware protection and identity and access management.
The survey found that 55% of respondents ranked lack of automation as the No. 1 challenge in security operations and management, reflecting their inability to manually analyze and respond to the flood of notifications and events generated by an increasingly complex security infrastructure.
"Entering 2020, organizations were in the midst of addressing security challenges associated with the increasingly distributed IT landscape spanning cloud, edge and on-premises environments. These challenges greatly intensified with the rapid work-from-home expansion brought on by the pandemic," said Shawn O'Grady, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud + Data Center Transformation, at Insight, in a statement.