Why Less is More In The Modern IT Environment

Jessica Amado

Oct 3, 2023

As IT environments expand, security teams adopt new tools and technologies in an attempt to effectively manage risks. However, in most cases, the growing arsenal of security tools has the adverse effect.

With each tool built differently, and producing its own results, it’s difficult to integrate and synthesize their output, which leads to a number of challenges. The whitepaper on Staying Ahead of Risk and Exposure Using a Remediation Operations Platform by TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) unveiled that the top three challenges associated with managing an assortment of security products are:

The use of multiple, siloed security technologies prevents a streamlined workflow. Instead, security teams must manually intervene, which only adds to their workloads and puts a strain on their already-tight-resources.

56% of respondents indicate their organization struggles to recruit cybersecurity talent.

Fortinet Global Research Report, Cybersecurity Skills Gap, 2023

According to ESG, 45% of organizations claim to have a problematic shortage in cybersecurity skills, with Fortinet’s 2023 Cybersecurity Skills Gaps report revealing that 56% of respondents indicate their organizations struggle to recruit cybersecurity talent. The skill shortage can have serious consequences, with 70% of leaders in Fortinet’s research agreeing that it creates additional risks for their organization.

Fail to scale, fail at scale

The top challenge to vulnerability management is keeping up with the volume of open vulnerability findings.

ESG Whitepaper, Staying Ahead of risk and Exposure Using a Remediation Operations Platform, June 2023

With security teams overworked and under-resourced, it is difficult to keep up with findings. In fact, the top challenge to vulnerability management is keeping up with the volume of open vulnerability findings.

Overwhelmed with the number of findings from the various segregated tools, security teams’ processes slow down and fail to scale with the faster development cycle. As a result, development teams get held back due to security concerns and have to go back and fix earlier issues, which is extremely disruptive and delays releasing code to production.

But even more concerning is that the top three challenges associated with the faster development lifecycle are:

These challenges mean findings and alerts can easily go undetected and unremediated, resulting in development teams releasing vulnerable code and placing the organization at risk of a breach.

Moving towards productive remediation operations

• Grow your arsenal…to an extent
  As noted at the outset, when security teams adopt new technologies to effectively manage risks in the increasingly dynamic enterprise, the opposite often happens. They end up with a complex, siloed collection of data that must be manually reconciled. Not only is this time consuming and inefficient, but the overwhelming number of findings are almost impossible to keep up with, resulting in an ineffective remediation process. So, while it is necessary to acquire more security testing tools as the IT environment gets more complex, it’s imperative that such tools enable security teams to gain a complete picture of their security status to facilitate actionable and effective remediation.
• Tools must fit in to stand out
  Security teams should use a platform that brings all the data streams from their various security testing tools together in a single unified view. By compiling all the findings into one place, security teams are left with actionable information which they can then feed into the relevant stakeholder’s workflow. The consolidation of disjointed data streamlines the remediation process so security and development teams better understand what needs attention – and in a more timely manner – allowing for more productive and scalable remediation efforts.
• Remediation automation
  Tools that automate remediation processes eliminate the need for security teams’ manual intervention and reduce disruption to development teams. Seemplicity’s Remediation Operations platform collects and aggregates findings across various siloed tools to reduce visibility gaps and eliminate ticket duplications, intelligently routing remediation requests to the relevant fixers. A remediation operations platform enables an efficient and effective remediation process that enhances productivity and significantly reduces risk, all while using the security team’s existing tools so as to get the most value out of them.

To learn more about how Seemplicity can help automate remediation operations across your organization and accelerate risk reduction, click here.

Jessica Amado

Jessie is Senior Marketing Manager at Seemplicity, where she helps guide the company’s digital and content marketing initiatives across content, campaigns, and go-to-market strategy. She focuses on translating complex cybersecurity challenges into clear, actionable narratives that drive awareness and engagement around agentic exposure management. Prior to Seemplicity, Jessie was head of cyber research and content at Sepio Systems. Jessie holds a BA with honors from Regent’s University London and a Master’s degree in political science and government from Reichman University.