Complex environments are the second most prominent security concern following second year of pandemic in META

The cost of securing increasingly complex environments was ranked second in the top challenges IT leaders in META say their businesses are facing in 2021. With digitalization, remote work and cloud usage growth, this complexity may impact organizations’ visibility of threats and incident response.

2020 saw lockdowns and remote work stimulate the use of digital technologies in businesses. According to a study by McKinsey & Company, companies have accelerated the digitization of their customer and supply-chain interactions along with the share of digital or digitally-enabled products in their portfolios. This required massive adoption of new IT services and changes to IT infrastructure.

Businesses had to ensure the safety of all these innovations, which became a real challenge for almost half of all companies (48%). Only data protection was higher – the concern that has stayed in first place for several years already. The cost of securing complex environments turned out to be even more crucial than ensuring compliance with security policies. Cloud adoption has also contributed to IT infrastructure complexity.

The problem with complex infrastructure is not only that it is difficult to roll out security tools. It makes it much more difficult to track down the signs of an attack and respond to it in a timely way to minimize the possible damage. In fact, lack of visibility over the infrastructure is among 3 common challenges (63%) organizations face when dealing with complex threats.

Fortunately, the issue stimulates investment. 37%) of enterprises named the increased complexity of their IT infrastructure as the reason to increase their IT security budget.

“When it comes to corporate cybersecurity, the matter is not only related to ever-evolving threats. A heterogeneous and constantly-changing corporate IT infrastructure further increases the stakes. On one hand, it complicates the very process of protection; on the other, the consequences of a successful attack may be much more difficult to address. Fortunately, the cybersecurity industry doesn’t stand still. The most up-to-date threat intelligence and solutions for detection and response should help organizations undertake the challenge and embrace any innovations for their business growth,” saysSergey Martsynkyan, VP, Corporate Product Marketing at Kaspersky.

To protect complex infrastructure, with cloud and on-premises workloads, VDI and remote workforce, organizations should look for a solution with strong detection and response capabilities. The solution should give visibility of threats in any endpoint with background information about malicious activity and options for response actions. Kaspersky Hybrid Cloud Security -— which includes updated Kaspersky Security for Virtualization Light Agent, dedicated to the protection of virtualized environments and VDI -— now integrates with Kaspersky Endpoint Detection and Response Optimum, Kaspersky Sandbox, and Kaspersky Anti Targeted Attack Platform. Together with endpoint security, they ensure essential protection for the infrastructure of any complexity.