Security Analytics Still Greenfield Opportunity

Stats from two new reports this week show that enterprises are getting better at analyzing security data across their organizations. But there’s room for improvement in how they use analytics to anticipate and respond to security incidents. In particular, cybersecurity teams struggle to marry up their expectations with their execution and deployment of the technology.

Today, SANS Institute leaked out details from a new survey it expects to release in full next month. Among the high points is the fact that organizations are slowly getting better at leveraging security analytics and threat intelligence.

Approximately two-thirds of organizations say they’ve gotten their mean time to detect security events down to a week or under, compared with just half of organizations last year. Plus, the ratio of organizations who can’t identify how to measure normal behavior has shrunk from about one-third down to a quarter of organizations.

Overall, about 83 percent of organizations report improving visibility into events and breaches.

“Detection and response times are improving, and many teams feel like they are building more effective security event management and intelligence programs with analytics capabilities," says Dave Shackleford, SANS analyst and author of the upcoming report.

Nevertheless, the true inflection point for security analytics is still a long way off given some additional data points provided in a Ponemon Institute survey released yesterday. The study, sponsored by Prelert, showed that even though two-thirds of security specialists believe automated security analytics is crucial for network defense, only a third of them have actually deployed analytics technology to support that.

Additionally, less than 10 percent of organizations report that they are effective in detecting or prioritizing advanced threats. Of those companies that have deployed analytics technology, about half take days or longer to communicate that information to incident response teams.

What’s more, 60 percent say that five or more security breaches were not stopped in the past two years due to insufficient or outdated threat intelligence.