“The digital transformation or DX wave appears to be sweeping away everything that stands before it, and cybersecurity worries have emerged as a significant obstacle to the transformation process,” said Alain Penel, Regional Vice President- Middle East, Fortinet.

“Currently, four areas stand out as particularly acute cybersecurity pain points for organisations adopting a DX approach: cloud computing, with a particular focus on multi-cloud environments; IoT; a burgeoning threat landscape; and rising regulatory pressure. It is crucial to understand that while organisations are turning to DX to achieve growth as well as other key business objectives, DX processes also require an equivalent security transformation with the integration of security into all areas of digital technology. This results in fundamental changes to how security is architected, deployed, and operated, highlighting why organisations need a programmatic approach to DX and security transformation, one where they are tied in lockstep with each other.”

The survey also found that there were a number of effective behaviours shown by the organisations that had not suffered a damaging security incident in the past two years, and those that had been attacked multiple times.

The most effective organisations are 76% more likely to integrate security systems to form a unified security architecture; 38% more likely to share threat intelligence across their organisation; 34% more likely to make sure safeguards work everywhere (on-premises cloud, IoT, mobile, etc.); 24% more likely to build in compliance controls for centralized tracking and reporting, for both industry and security standards; 24% more likely to have automated more than half of their security practices and 20% more likely to have end-to-end visibility across all environments.

Penel added: “The implications are clear. Holistic and integrated security strategies are more effective than siloed, reactive ones. A strategic approach becomes increasingly important as an organisation’s attack surface increases with the proliferation of devices, whether for a mobile workforce or as part of an IoT initiative and the adoption of cloud, particularly multi-cloud, environments. Further, a comprehensive strategy that unifies IT tools and processes across all parts of the network is necessary for addressing advanced threats such as polymorphic attacks, as well as new vulnerabilities that sneak in because of DevOps. At the same time, integration of security elements is a fundamental requisite for an organisation seeking to automate workflows and threat intelligence sharing.”