How SASE Can Help to Reduce Security Team Burn-Out

Security personnel have a lot on their plates, and the problem is only getting worse. SASE vendors may have a solution that can help.

Security Teams are Overwhelmed

The average organization’s security team is understaffed and overwhelmed, leading to burnout. This situation is created by a number of different factors including:

• Growing Infrastructure Complexity: Most organizations have adopted cloud computing, remote work, and other new technologies in recent years. While these solutions provide a number of benefits to the business, they also create a sprawling IT infrastructure made up of disparate endpoints, each with their own security challenges and requirements.
• Disconnected Security: Many security teams have adopted a strategy of deploying point security products designed to address specific challenges or provide certain functionality. While this provides support for a range of use cases, it also creates a security architecture that is difficult to monitor and manage. Security personnel need to learn to use and context switch between a variety of application-specific dashboards.
• High Alert Volumes: The combination of an increasingly complex IT infrastructure and a range of point security solutions means that most security teams are buried under a deluge of logs and security alerts. The average enterprise receives 10,000 security alerts per day, which is many more than they can effectively investigate and respond to. As a result, security personnel are overwhelmed while real attacks slip through the cracks.
• Expanding Regulatory Landscape: In recent years, a number of new data protection regulations have been passed and gone into effect, including the GDPR, CCPA, and others. Each of these regulations has its own required security controls, processes, and reporting requirements, which dramatically increases the overhead associated with regulatory compliance.
• Cybersecurity Skills Gap: Exacerbating all of these issues is the fact that the cybersecurity industry is suffering from a significant shortage of skilled personnel. As a result, organizations are unable to attract and retain the security talent that they need, leaving them understaffed and lacking crucial security expertise.

Despite all of these challenges, security teams are still responsible for protecting the enterprise. As a result, security personnel are overstretched and at risk of burnout.

The Problem is Only Getting Worse

Some of the stressors of corporate cybersecurity will abate with the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, many of these challenges are not going away, and, in some cases, the challenges will only increase, such as:

• Growing Cloud Adoption: Organizations have been adopting cloud computing for years, but the trend continues to accelerate. As a result, more organizations are likely to deploy sprawling, multi-cloud deployments that are difficult to effectively monitor and secure.
• Support for Telework: While many employees will return to the office, many organizations plan to support remote work - at least part time and for a portion of their workforce - indefinitely. As telework becomes “business as usual”, organizations will have to design it into their security strategies, replacing the band-aid solutions of the COVID era with more permanent and sustainable security solutions.
• Increased IoT Deployment: 5G networks provide higher data speeds and support for denser concentrations of devices than previous generations, making them ideally suited for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. As 5G rollout continues, business use of IoT devices will grow, creating additional challenges as security teams scramble to protect these notoriously insecure devices.
• More Sophisticated Cyber Threats: Cybercriminals and other cyber threat actors have grown more sophisticated and skilled over the years. This makes it increasingly difficult for security teams to identify, block, and remediate their attacks.

Security Integration is Essential for Sustainable Security

Cybersecurity is challenging, and the problem is only going to get worse in future years. However, the easy solution of adding more cybersecurity personnel to address growing challenges is not a feasible one. If anything, the gap between supply and demand of cybersecurity personnel is expanding as cybersecurity expertise becomes more crucial to meeting business needs.

With growing challenges and a limited workforce, the only solution to building a sustainable security strategy is to focus on making security teams’ jobs easier. Security integration is a key component of this. By unifying a security architecture into a single tool and dashboard, an organization decreases the learning curve and wasted time for security personnel and unlocks the potential for security automation.

Accomplishing this requires a security solution that can be applied to any device in the corporate network, regardless of deployment location. For this, an organization needs a solution like SASE.

SASE is a cloud-native solution that integrates the network optimization of SD-WAN with a full security stack. Its networking functionality makes it a logical and high-performance option for all business traffic, providing complete network visibility, and its integrated security functionality ensures that all business traffic undergoes security inspection. Additionally, since the same solution can be used in all business contexts - on-prem, cloud, and telework - it provides a single, consistent solution for security personnel, decreasing their workload and stress levels.