As the COVID-19 pandemic drags global economies to a halt, enterprises are having to tighten their belts across the board, including in IT. In May Gartner predicted that worldwide IT spending will decrease by 9% in 2020 compared to last year. According to a Barracuda survey released in May, 40% of companies have cut their cybersecurity budgets as a cost-saving measure to help tackle the COVID-19 crisis.
This means that cybersecurity teams might postpone planned upgrades to core security systems, such as security information and event management (SIEM) platforms. SIEMs are the heart of many enterprise security operations centers, pulling in security-related data from throughout the enterprise and helping security analysts identify threats.
As SIEMs age, companies start to see problems. Older platforms have a hard time ingesting and processing data from new sources, such as hybrid and cloud architectures and SaaS applications. They may also not have the latest analytics tools to spot suspicious behaviors or prioritize threats based on potential impact.
Older SIEMs may also have limits on how much information they can ingest economically, forcing companies to limit their visibility. Meanwhile, the threats aren’t going away. Evidence shows that attackers are taking advantage of the pandemic to step up their activities.
According to the Barracuda survey, 51% of companies have already seen an increase in phishing attacks since shifting to a remote working model, 51% of respondents said their workforce is not proficient or properly trained in the cyber risks associated with remote working, 46% are not confident their web applications are secure, and 50% have allowed employees to use personal email addresses and personal devices to conduct company work.
