Today’s CISOs have an unenviable task. The cyber threat environment changes constantly, new threats continually emerge, legacy tools get tired, the environment grows ever more complex, and new tools or approaches may promise much but deliver a host of challenges and frustrations. In fact, the reason Gartner’s hype cycle strikes such a chord with CISOs is that they live through it every day.
Amid the turmoil, CISOs must attempt to define a strategic approach to technology investment that will protect the business over the long term. They are operating within parameters relating to their organization’s size, resources, maturity, existing infrastructure, and the specific threat pressures or regulations influencing their sector. For example, organizations looking to consolidate the number of tools in their security stack, reduce the management burden, and retire legacy solutions may opt for a single-vendor platform approach that unites a comprehensive range of solutions and reporting capabilities under one provider. At the other end of the scale, organizations with good internal resources and very specific protection requirements may seek to obtain best-of-breed solutions in a bid to achieve the highest levels of performance and security.
