New Study Uncovers Network Security’s Biggest Challenges
ProtectWise, a leader of Cloud-delivered Network Detection & Response (NDR), released a new report, “The Evolving State of Network Security,” that looks at the biggest network security challenges companies face including staffing priorities, the need for specialized roles, and the inherent limitations of endpoint security. The study, conducted in partnership with Osterman Research, interviewed 400 security analysts in the US to uncover the current state of network security across organizations with 1,000 or more employees.
The research also outlines the day-to-day efforts, impedances, and time spent on specific tasks within the SOC. This research indicates that there is much work to be done to improve security efficiency – and as a result, larger organizations are beginning to invest in specialized roles.

Ramon Peypoch, Chief Product Officer at ProtectWise, Inc.
To gain a deeper insight into the report’s findings, Brilliance Security Magazine spoke with Ramon Peypoch, Chief product officer at ProtectWise. He told us that, for him, one of the more interesting facts that surfaced in the research was that the larger the organization, the greater the emphasis that it places on threat intelligence and threat hunting. He said, “For example, 46 percent of larger organizations have specialized roles or teams for threat intelligence and 40 percent of them have teams specifically for threat hunting. Conversely, only 18 percent and 26 percent, respectively, for midsized organizations; and 14 percent and 17 percent, respectively, for smaller organizations.”
While this report attempts to correlate the size of an organization’s security team with the number of employees working at the firm, Ramon agreed that the conversation should really be more about how smaller teams can be as effective and efficient as larger teams when deploying the right arsenal of security tools. He also noted that while the research points toward a tendency for larger organization to rely less on endpoint protection and more on network security, both are an integral part of a holistic and layered security approach.
Addressing endpoint security and specialized roles within a security team, Michael Osterman, principal analyst of Osterman Research said, “Despite the amount of public discussion, the use of endpoint security to remediate security incidents may be more suitable for smaller organizations and/or those with less complex environments, with organizations graduating to network security as the size of the organization, security team and the number of alerts and threats increases,” continuing, “Organizations of all sizes should also look to create specialized roles and consider threat intelligence as a means to keep pace with the evolving threat landscape.”
The below infographic outlines the highlights of this new report and a link to download your own copy of the report is below it.
Infographic_StateOfNetworkSecurity
To see the full results of the survey and download a copy of the report, please visit https://info.protectwise.com/osterman-state-of-network-security.
By: Steven Bowcut, CPP, PSP, Brilliance Security Magazine Editor-in-Chief