NetSecOps: Aligning Networking and Security Team to Ensure Digital Transformation
by Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, EMA
For many years, EMA has observed signs that enterprises are trying to align their network infrastructure and operations teams with information security and cybersecurity teams. EMA market research has found signs of increased collaboration between these groups. Also, vendors have tried to provide solutions that facilitate this collaboration. For instance, network performance management vendors have started offering security solutions based on their existing intellectual property.
EMA refers to this phenomenon as NetSecOps
EMA has completed a definitive study of the NetSecOps trend. Based on a survey of 366 technology professionals and in-depth interviews with several stakeholders at billion-dollar companies, the new EMA report, “NetSecOps: Aligning Networking and Security Team to Ensure Digital Transformation,” examines why this collaboration is occurring, how enterprises enable it, and where it fails.
Three-quarters of the organizations EMA surveyed reported that the amount of collaboration between network teams and security teams has increased over the last few years. More than 92% of them reported that executive leaders such as CIOs and CISOs have introduced formal policies and programs to encourage this collaboration, implementing best practices frameworks, reorganizing groups, and introducing budget sharing.
Digital transformation is at least partially responsible for this wave of NetSecOps partnerships. EMA asked research participants whether any technical initiatives were driving network and security teams to work together. Their top four responses were:
- Public cloud adoption (81%)
- Work-from-anywhere/work-from-home (81%)
- Data center modernization (81%)
- Internet of things/Edge computing (79%)
While collaboration is increasing and CIOs are trying to take the lead, not everyone is executing these partnerships well. Only 39% of organizations told EMA that they have been fully successful with NetSecOps collaboration. Some of the leading roadblocks to success were data quality and data authority issues, cross-team skills gaps, budget shortages, and architectural complexity.
EMA’s NetSecOps research takes a deep dive into how enterprises overcome these barriers to NetSecOps collaboration, looking at the data and tools that bring these group together, the leadership strategies that work, and more.
Register for the October 19 NetSecOps research webinar to get highlights of this new and exciting research! 