siliconindia | | APRIL 20219all, they're having a hard time meshing security automation tools with legacy systems and architectures. Nearly two in three organizations say it is difficult integrating security au-tomation technologies with existing IT systems. Not only that, but security teams are also straining to integrate nu-merous security automation tools into a cohesive security stack. Approximately 71 percent of respondents pointed to the inability to integrate disparate security tools as their top challenge in building an effective automated security ar-chitecture.AUTOMATION BLOCKER 2: VENDOR SPRAWL IS KILLING THEMOne of the reasons that integration is such a bugbear is that the best-of-breed approach is killing security teams with a bad case of security vendor sprawl. Around 59 percent of respondents reported a need to streamline the number of vendors in their architecture. This has increasingly been a point of contention for CISOs lately. This spring, venture capitalist Ken Elephant, managing director at Sorenson Capital, estimated that in a straw pool of CISOs from major companies he was seeing an average of 80 security vendors under management."That may sound like an enviable position; so many vendors providing protection for a company's business ef-forts," he wrote in an opinion piece for HelpNetSecurity. "But it signals that there is too much noise in the market. CISOs don't want to manage 80 products -- they want to have a holistic solution involving fewer vendors."This reality was reflected in the Ponemon Study, which showed that as many as 63 percent of respondents leaned toward a solitary vendor or one single vendor with a few specialized products as their ideal solution for delivering security functionality in an ideal world. The other 37 per-cent wished for a mix of best-of-breed products interoper-able through functional APIs.AUTOMATION BLOCKER 4: THEY'RE STRUG-GLING TO SCALE AUTOMATION ACROSS THE ENTERPRISEAs a corollary to the issue of vendor sprawl, organizations say that they're having a difficult time scaling automated security processes across the organization. With so many different security tools and integration problems, it should hardly be a surprise that 55 percent of respondents say their top barrier to successfully deploying security automation is their inability to apply controls that span across the enter-prise. Nearly on par with that, 49 percent say another major barrier is the fact that they can't create a unified view of users across the enterprise.This is probably why industry analysts are predicting another big surge of vendor consolidation for the security world in the next couple of years. For example, in its secu-rity spending predictions this year IDC says it believes that by 2020 30 percent of security spending will be on vendors that offer an integrated platform approach to security."This shift will happen partly because of the budget, but mostly because of complexity. Reducing complexity by moving to integrated platforms, whether in the cloud or on-premises, supporting a hybrid environment, also provides the potential for enhanced security as companies will make One of the reasons that integration is such a bugbear is that the best-of-breed approach is killing security teams with a bad case of security vendor sprawl
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