Foundry recently released our annual Security Priorities Study which examines the state of security in markets around the globe as well as the challenges that organizations face as they seek to manage information risk.

Our research indicates security leaders have the following as their top security priorities for 2022 and beyond:

  1. Most important, is being appropriately prepared to respond to a security incident. Frankly, that’s table stakes in this business today.
  2. Upgrading their IT and data security to boost corporate resiliency. It’s become readily apparent that every dollar an organization invests in information security must be justified against a business outcome that will help deliver on the promise of improved resiliency.
  3. They continue to focus on improving and increasing security awareness among their end users through training. With the top cause of security incidents being non-malicious user error, security awareness training and efforts go directly at the heart of that threat.
  4. They’re focused on improving the protection of confidential and sensitive data that they hold. Whether that data is on-prem or in the cloud, business leaders understand that they have a fiduciary responsibility to protect customer data, partner data, and intellectual property.
  5. Rounding out the top five security priorities is the focus on enhancing identity and access controls, an issue which is increasingly important as businesses move to adopt a zero-trust approach to security.

As mentioned, there are certain areas of cybersecurity that IT leaders are struggling with this year. Staffing and skill shortages, for example, are forcing businesses to change the way that they address risk from a technology investment standpoint. That’s why 45% of our respondents this year are utilizing technologies that automate elements of security to combat those shortages.

Technologies like SOAR (security orchestration, automation, and response) are increasingly of interest as businesses look to automate key parts of their security infrastructure. Human resource challenges are also driving businesses to outsource more elements of their security infrastructure.

SOAR is garnering the most interest from buyers.

  • SOAR led this year’s study when we looked at technologies gaining a lot of interest and investment dollars.
  • Second, Zero Trust technologies continue their steady pace to broad adoption across enterprises. Not a single technology, but rather a framework and collection of technologies designed to manage risk at the most basic levels, leaders are finding that Zero Trust security might well be a very good solution for their enterprises.
  • Third was SASE, which has continued to gain traction since enterprises began their evolutionary shift from “in the office” to distributed work environments.

Investing dollars in technologies like SOAR and Zero Trust have the promise of delivering big benefits, but a third of businesses surveyed don’t measure the efficacy of the solutions they install for six months after their installation or more. Almost one out of 10 don’t even have a process for post deployment assessment to make sure that those technologies at doing what they were put in place to do, we’re seeing a new blind spot emerge that has the potential to be tomorrow’s emerging risk.

To get insight on more research from the 2022 Security Priorities Study, download our white paper here or request a meeting with a Foundry sales executive to walk through the full study on our samples slides page here.