According to newly published ESG research, just over half of all organizations (52%) say that security operations are more difficult today than they were two years ago. When asked why, 41% pointed to an evolving and dangerous threat landscape, 38% identified a growing and changing attack surface, 37% said that alert volume and complexity are driving this change, and 34% blamed growing use of public cloud computing services.
Now most of these challenges are déjà vu all over again, impacting security teams year after year. There is one exception, however: The growing attack surface. Certainly, the attack surface has been growing steadily since we all started using Mosaic browsers, but things really took off over the past few years. Blame Amazon, COVID, or digital transformation, but organizations are connecting IT systems to third parties, supporting remote workers, developing cloud-native applications, and using SaaS services in record numbers. When you take all these factors into consideration, enterprise organizations typically use tens of thousands of internet-facing assets.