Companies Under Siege: The Need for Security Automation at Scale

Corporate defenses need to be stronger than ever these days, but 85% of security teams are understaffed. Three new statistics came out last week which present a clear picture of the state of cybersecurity: companies are under siege and do not have enough personnel to handle the ongoing work of patching vulnerabilities and securing their networks.

​Businesses lack the capability to keep up with vulnerabilities and the staff to improve their defenses, while attacks are increasing and no dataset is too small to invite intrusion.

Because vulnerabilities are going unpatched, corporate defenses need to be stronger than ever. But stronger defenses require more personnel, and that additional personnel needs to be highly trained in a competitive and fast-moving industry where problems arise more rapidly than their solutions.

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The increase in breaches last year isn’t surprising, we’ve seen increases every year for the past five years. While it may be seen as a sign of progress that the average size of breaches was 4.7 times smaller in 2018, it only shows that attackers are willing to go after any amount of information. Security through obscurity doesn’t work for software or hardware and won’t work for corporations or data sets.

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Companies of all sizes are under attack, from small clinics to hospital consortiums, family-run stores to investment banks. If there’s a ceiling on remediating vulnerabilities (and some of those vulnerabilities are very expensive to remediate), and there aren’t enough people to manage the layers of security that companies need these days, then we need to engage with new tools and solutions that allow fewer people to do the job of a full team.

This means more security tools based on machine learning and AI. Rather than replacing personnel, security tools must work in concert with them, to provide insight where humans can’t easily see, and let personnel focus on their best and most productive tasks.

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