More than 80% of security leaders believe the challenge posed by external threats is on the rise, while 60% also agree their organizations are outgunned in the cyber war, according to IBM.
The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) study, conducted by the IBM Center for Applied Insights and is based on responses from 138 in-depth interviews.
Two in five respondents identified sophisticated external threats as their top challenge with regulations coming in a distant second at just under 15%.
As enterprise leaders continue to outline business priorities, external threats will require the most organizational effort over the next three to five years – as much as regulations, new technologies, and internal threats combined.
“CISOs are finally getting a seat in the boardroom,” said Brendan Hannigan, general manager of IBM Security. “Security leaders must now use this growing influence to deliver better results — prioritizing the protection of critical assets, focusing investments on intelligence and recruiting top industry talent to augment internal efforts.”
The study found that 70% of security leaders believe they have mature, traditional technologies that focus on network intrusion prevention, advanced malware detection and network vulnerability scanning.
However, nearly half agree that deploying new security technology is the top focus area for their organization. They identified data leakage prevention, cloud security and mobile/device security as the top three areas in need of dramatic transformation.