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SANS Survey Reveals Lack Of Skilled Personnel As The Biggest Barrier To Implementing Security Tools

SEATTLE, Nov. 12, 2015 /PRNewswire/ – DomainTools®, the leader in domain name and DNS research, today announced a new 2015 Analytics and Intelligence Survey, conducted by the SANS Institute. The research revealed that the demand for cybersecurity tools and resources has doubled since 2014, with the majority (59 percent) of respondents citing a lack of skills and dedicated resources as the main obstacles to discovering and acting on cybersecurity incidents and breaches. The results allude to an industry-wide disconnect with 43 percent of enterprises fully understanding the importance of cyber threat solutions yet still relying on manual processes to protect their organization. Currently, only 9 percent of enterprises’ analytics and intelligence processes used for uncovering a breach are automated. The full research report can be downloaded here .On the bright side, while cybersecurity attacks have increased 66 percent since 2009, the research revealed the time to remediation is improving. In 2015, 67 percent of organizations were able to unearth an attack in one week or less versus only 50 percent in 2014. With detection and response times improving, the majority (83 percent) of organizations believe visibility into cyber incidents has improved with more effective intelligence programs that leverage analytics capabilities. In fact, almost half of organizations are diligently working to increase visibility by integrating data from external threat providers and another 31 percent are planning to do so in the future.

“Security professionals are under constant pressure to identify and mitigate breaches as soon as they occur, making threat intelligence and analytics-driven solutions critical in any security team’s arsenal,” said Tim Chen, CEO of DomainTools. “According to these SANS survey findings, underinvestment in skilled security personnel remains a significant barrier for implementing more powerful solutions. Our threat intelligence platform, Iris, is designed to improve security analytics by greatly enhancing the efficiency of incident responders and hunt teams who are using Whois and DNS data in their investigations.”

Key findings from the report include:

  • 35 percent of organizations cite a lack of centralized reporting and remediation controls as a barrier to identifying cybersecurity incidents.
  • Only 3 percent of organizations feel that their analytics and intelligence processes for pattern recognition are fully automated, and another 6 percent report having a “highly automated” intelligence and analytics environment.
  • 26 percent still can’t understand and baseline “normal” cybersecurity behavior, making it difficult for them to identify and block abnormal behaviors.

The survey was comprised of 476 security and business executives with the majority of companies having more than 20,000 employees from industries including technology and IT services, financial services and banking, government, education, and healthcare. For more information on DomainTools or to request a demo, please visit www.domaintools.com