Inadequate Security Comes with Significant Ongoing Costs to the Business

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Inadequate Security Comes with Significant Ongoing Costs to the Business

The cost of a security breach is well documented, but it’s only one of the financial consequences of inadequate security. Poor security practices can have effects that resonate across the organization and impact the top and bottom lines.

At DeSeMa, we’re proud to offer expert IT security services to ensure that your business’s security performance is up to date and can protect your data the way it should. Learn more about the consequences of poor IT security below, and reach out to our team to see how we can help today!

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Poor Performance

If you don’t have the right security tools, or if they aren’t tuned properly, network performance can slow to a crawl. A good example is inspection of encrypted traffic. Older firewalls simply don’t have the processing power to decrypt and inspect traffic efficiently. One NSS Labs study found that deep packet inspection of encrypted traffic caused a 60% decrease in application performance and a 72% increase in response time.

There are also correct points at which you should implement security. For example, even if you have a high-performance firewall, it can become a bottleneck if it’s trying to do all the work. You need to balance what your firewall is doing with what your host-based controls are doing.

Poor network and application performance reduces productivity and frustrates users. Network administrators have been known to turn off firewall features when users complain about performance problems. In addition to the cost of lost productivity, you’ve wasted some of the investment in the security tool.

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Increased IT Staffing Demands

A corollary to performance problems is increased IT staffing demands. Poorly tuned IT security tools generate a lot of events and alerts, many of which are duplicative and false positives. Few organizations have the resources to investigate them all, so it just becomes “noise.”

Additionally, many organizations invest in security point solutions to address a particular threat. This often leads to an overabundance of security tools that don’t talk to one another and create management headaches.

An IDG survey found that enterprises have an average of 19 different security tools, and nearly one-third have 30 to 100 separate tools. According to 71% of respondents, most of these tools are underutilized, and managing them hinders their ability to combat threats.

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Inflexibility

When organizations shifted overnight to remote operations, they quickly found that security stood in the way. Their security infrastructure was designed to protect endpoints, applications, and data within the network perimeter. To their credit, IT teams worked quickly to facilitate a distributed workforce. However, some of these remote access solutions were clunky at best and wholly inadequate at worst.

Virtual private networks (VPNs) are a pain for employees to use and a gaping security hole in themselves. Some of the problem was relieved by moving applications and data to the cloud, but that’s not a foolproof solution, either.

An inflexible IT security infrastructure is also extremely limiting when it comes down to working with vendors and business partners. If the only way to access your data is over a VPN, the level of effort required to get the two networks to work together is phenomenal.

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Digital Transformation Roadblocks

Digital transformation increases security threats. As organizations are moving more rapidly to the cloud, they’re opening up their systems to digital sales channels and supply chains to increase efficiency and better serve their customers. They’re investing in automation and analytics, Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, and artificial intelligence technologies. All of these things create risks if they’re not managed properly with security in mind.

If security is inadequate in the first place, it serves as a roadblock to digital transformation. Simply put, organizations will not survive in the digital age if their security is not mature enough to support their digital transformation initiatives.

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Next Steps In IT Security

None of these issues are insurmountable. However, it requires a fresh approach that looks beyond particular threats and regulatory requirements and considers how to better align IT security with business and operational requirements. This approach views security not only as a means of reducing risk, but also as a valuable tool for business enablement.

The DeSeMa team has the skills, experience, and insight to help you take your security to the next level. We invite you to sit down with us and discuss your security bottlenecks, and let us find ways to reduce these ongoing costs.

In our next post, we’ll examine how poor security increases cloud costs and what you can do about it. If you have questions, or you would like to start the process of improving your IT security, reach out to our experts today! We look forward to working with you.

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