Collaboration Can Help Ease Security Staffing Shortages: Report

Staffing is a well-known problem in security today. A new report from Intel Security points to the use of collaboration to improve efficiency and reduce the strain of skills shortages.

While not a panacea for solving all security woes, collaboration has a measurable impact on improving security outcomes. Intel Security survey respondents thought that centralized collaboration could improve security by an average of 38 percent, thanks to improved effectiveness.

Among the benefits of improved collaboration is the potential to detect issues faster than an organization that isn’t properly sharing information and security insights.

A key metric used by many security vendors is the time it takes for an organization to fix an issue after a breach has occurred. According to Intel Security’s research, collaboration can have a significant impact on remediation times, providing the right information to the people who can make the required changes.

Regardless of where an employee may be in the world, collaboration can help enable remote actions. The top remote action identified in the Intel Security study is network isolation to help limit and contain security risks.

Moving toward automated security processes is a key benefit of improved collaboration, though not all IT processes can, in fact, be easily automated. While network isolation was identified as a top remote action, less than half of Intel Security’s survey respondents would permit isolation to become a fully automated function.

Organizations use an average of four tools to investigate and remediate security incidents, while 20 percent of organizations were found to use more than six and as many as 15 different tools.

Intel Security identified the use of advanced threat and incident management (ATIM) technology as a best practice of leading IT organizations. Those that use an ATIM platform conduct, on average, 10 security investigations per year, double the number that non-ATIM-using organizations conducted.