As more workers collaborate virtually, many organizations now depend on additional digital communication tools beyond email. New collaboration tools provide attackers the opportunity to engage with humans to evade automated controls, extending phishing, BEC, credential theft, and other socially engineered attacks beyond email. Advanced attacks leverage multiple attack vectors, requiring individual, core security controls to work together to detect and prevent advanced attacks. This extends beyond traditional security operations tools (e.g., SIEM, SOAR, EDR, and XDR) to core network, cloud, endpoint, and identity controls.
As IT and security teams focus on risk-driven security strategies, consistency of policies and priorities across all enterprise communication channels becomes critical to strengthening security posture. More education is needed to motivate security architects to embrace this higher-level perspective. To gain further insight into these trends, TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) surveyed 490 IT and cybersecurity professionals at organizations in North America (US and Canada) and Western Europe (UK, France, and Germany) involved with securing enterprise communication and collaboration technology and processes.
In terms of the risk and security of the many electronic communication and collaboration tools in use, this study sought to answer:
Survey participants represented a wide range of industries including manufacturing, technology, financial services, and retail/wholesale. For more details, please see the Research Methodology and Respondent Demographics sections of this report.
For organizations well along on the path of their digital transformation journey, sound data governance practices are playing a strategic role. As the amount of data and value of that data to the business continue to increase, so too does the importance of managing its availability, usability, integrity, and security. Data governance is a loosely applied term in the data management space. As ecosystems evolve and become more distributed, end-users are struggling to connect the dots between the important elements of data governance like data classification, data indexing, data placement, e-discovery, and compliance.
In order to understand the benefits and challenges of data governance initiatives, establish the current state of deployments, identify gaps, and highlight future expectations, TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) surveyed 376 IT and business decision makers currently responsible for the governance technologies, processes, and programs used to manage their organizations’ data.
This study sought to answer the following questions:
Survey participants represented a wide range of industries including manufacturing, technology, financial services, and retail/wholesale. For more details, please see the Research Methodology and Respondent Demographics sections of this report.
Security hygiene and posture management has become increasingly difficult because of factors like a growing attack surface, the increased use of cloud computing, and the need to support a remote workforce. These factors can create security vulnerabilities that lead directly to cyber-attacks. Unfortunately, this pattern will likely persist as most organizations continue to approach security hygiene and posture management with point tools, spreadsheets, and manual processes.
Learn more about these trends with the infographic, Security Hygiene and Posture Management Remains Decentralized and Complex.
IT organizations are increasingly turning to a “cloud-first” strategy for their digital transformation initiatives to overcome challenges related to maintaining operations in a fast-paced business landscape. This approach involves prioritizing cloud-based, developer-friendly solutions over traditional on-premises software and infrastructure to increase agility.
Learn more about these trends with the infographic, Distributed Cloud Series: The Mainstreaming of Cloud-native Apps and Methodologies.
Nile has been out of stealth mode for almost a year now and has been steadily making progress delivering new capabilities, forming partnerships, and acquiring new customers. This $175 Million Series C funding was led by March Capital and Sanabil investments and a number of other strategic and contributing investors. Nile Raises $175M Series C Funding to Propel Its Vision to Redefine Enterprise Networks – Nile (nilesecure.com) An impressive round in an uncertain economy for sure.
Nile’s goal is to deliver next-generation network as a service (NaaS) solutions to its initial target market of k-12 and higher education markets, followed by enterprise customers. Nile delivers wired and wireless campus solutions via a cloud-based management approach that enables organizations to consume an inherently secure wired and wireless campus network entirely as a consumption-based service that includes initial assessment, design, deployment, and streamlined operations of the network.
Back in June, it announced a partnership with Palo Alto Networks to provide integrated security solutions and secure SD-WAN. The two companies have worked together to leverage APIs to integrate network data to provide enhanced zero trust (network, access, and isolation) solutions for their joint customers. Working with a global leader in security like Palo Alto Networks makes sense and its AI-powered and cloud driven approach is a good fit for highly distributed, modern network environments.
Having an initial focus on campus networks is a good choice for a startup like Nile as Wi-Fi technology evolves quickly (Wi-Fi 7 Consumer APs are already out) and high turnover rates (as compared to DC switches) provide an opportunity for Nile to gain traction quickly. Also, organizations are under pressure to re-imagine the campus — for the education market, it is about supporting more devices and ensuring secure and seamless experiences when coming back to campus. For the enterprise, the campus network needs to securely support the return to the office and accommodate bandwidth-intensive collaboration applications via Wi-Fi.
For virtually all markets, Wi-Fi connectivity is viewed as a utility, in the same way older generations simply expected to pick up a phone and get a dial tone (I know, I am showing my age). Nile understands that concept and has developed a solution that removes the complexity from assessing and designing a new solution and accelerates the deployment of new, secure campus wired and wireless technology. With its partnership with Palo Alto Networks, it provides enhanced security and includes secure SD-WAN as well.
Another notable aspect of Nile is who its founders are — namely Pankaj Patel and John Chambers. Many of you may remember John’s other successful startup — no, not Cisco, but Pensando — the company that set out to democratize smart NICs and distributed services for both enterprise and hyperscaler markets. Pensando is now part of AMD (April 2022 acquisition).
Nile came out of stealth with significant go-to-market channels already in place and has spent the last year acquiring customers and deploying solutions with streamlined operations that enable organizations to spend time working on strategic business initiatives and not responding to problems with their Wi-Fi networks. This latest round of funding will give them the opportunity to invest in additional resources to ramp up their go-to-market and deliver more tightly integrated solutions with partners like Palo Alto Networks.
Given the recent funding, next-gen technology, and veteran management team, it’s hard to bet against Nile. However, it should be noted that they do have formidable competition — not only from the established networking leader Cisco, but also from rising challengers, such as Arista, Extreme Networks, HPE Aruba Networking, and Juniper Networks (alphabetical order), that continue to innovate and grow.
Ultimately, this competition will drive innovation and Nile joining the field will only help to create a rising tide that will ultimately benefit all markets and enterprises with more secure, robust, and intelligent network environments. Nile has made a lot of progress in the last 12 months, and I am looking forward to seeing what the next 12 months bring.
Data management teams require new capabilities to effectively harness and extract value from expansive volumes of data culled from a growing number of sources. The goal is to reach a maturity level where insights are delivered in real time to keep pace with the operational needs of the business, innovate faster, and build competitive advantages.
Learn more about these trends with the infographic, Data Platforms: The Path to Achieving Data-driven Empowerment.
As the amount of data stored in the cloud continues to increase, so too do the challenges of securing that data from malicious attackers. According to research from TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group, organizations are more confident in their ability to secure on-premises data than data saved in the cloud. Indeed, 54% of organizations surveyed considered their on-premises data security strategies to be more effective than their public cloud infrastructure and application data security.
Read my blog to get more insights on how organizations are deploying cloud-native tools from CSPs and third-party tools from MSPs to achieve a defense-in-depth strategy and better secure cloud-resident data.
In today’s fast-paced business landscape, organizations must be sufficiently agile and flexible to meet the evolving needs of their customers. However, many still rely on legacy applications that can struggle to handle the demands of modern-day business requirements. This can create significant challenges for IT departments that are tasked with maintaining business operations while transitioning to more modern approaches that drive their organizations forward. To overcome these challenges, organizations are increasingly turning to a “cloud-first” strategy for their digital transformation initiatives. This approach involves prioritizing cloud-based, developer-friendly solutions over traditional on-premises software and infrastructure, allowing organizations to leverage the scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness of cloud computing to improve their operations, increase agility, and meet the needs of their customers more effectively.
To assess the landscape for cloud-native applications and methodologies, Enterprise Strategy Group surveyed 378 IT and DevOps/AppDev professionals in North America (US and Canada) responsible for evaluating, purchasing, building, and managing application infrastructure in their organization. This study sought to answer the following:
Survey participants represented a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, technology, financial services, and retail/wholesale. For more details, please see the Research Methodology and Respondent Demographics sections of this report.
Security hygiene and posture management has become increasingly difficult because of factors like a growing attack surface, the increased use of cloud computing, and the need to support a remote workforce. These factors can create security vulnerabilities that lead directly to cyber-attacks. Indeed, a majority of organizations have experienced at least one cyber-incident due to the exploitation of an unknown, unmanaged, or poorly managed internet-facing asset. Unfortunately, this pattern will likely persist as most organizations continue to approach security hygiene and posture management with point tools, spreadsheets, and manual processes. Organizations are prioritizing spending on security hygiene and posture management, focusing on areas like continuous security testing, process automation, and increasing staff. Security professionals also aspire to consolidate disparate point tools into a security observability, prioritization, and validation (SOPV) architecture to gain a holistic perspective across all aspects of security hygiene and posture management.
To gain further insight into these trends, TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) surveyed 383 IT and cybersecurity professionals at organizations in North America (US and Canada) responsible for evaluating, purchasing, and utilizing products and services for security hygiene and posture management, including vulnerability management, asset management, attack surface management, and security testing tools, among others.
This study sought to answer the following questions:
Survey participants represented a wide range of industries including manufacturing, technology, financial services, and retail/wholesale. For more details, please see the Research Methodology and Respondent Demographics sections of this report.
As part of a recent study by TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group, cybersecurity professionals were asked about the processes, tools, and overall assistance they need from managed detection and response (MDR) providers to help their security teams gain control and ensure future security program success. The research revealed that organizations do view MDR as a path to accelerate program development and fill gaps—and, as trust is established, this kind of relationship often grows considerably over time.