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A new research study has examined the negative security consequences of network overprovisioning in organizations, as well as prevalent behaviors and concerns. Overprovisioning is viewed as the top problem by over 70% of the 500 IT experts polled in the United States. The study was conducted by IDC Research and commissioned by Accedian, a pioneer in performance analytics, cybersecurity threat detection, and end-user experience solutions.
As described in the report, this would underscore the need for an alternate strategy that is both sustainable and cost-effective, while maximizing network and application performance as well as security visibility.
“Overprovisioning means there is more infrastructure to protect, a larger attack surface, more attack vectors, and an increased opportunity for the misconfiguration of tools due to human error or Security Operations Center (SOC) overload. It is like a ticking time bomb for enterprises unless urgent action is taken to rectify it,” said Chris Kissel, IDC Research Director, Worldwide Security & Trust Products. “Given the extent of overprovisioning taking place across industries including financial services, public sector, healthcare, IT, manufacturing, and retail, coupled with the surge in security incidents in the past year, it’s more about ‘when’ and not ‘if’ a cyberattack is successful.”
Some of key highlights from the research include:
- Overprovisioning is the top issue for 72 percent of IT professionals, followed by administration (55 percent) and budgeting (14 percent) (48 percent )
- Network security, according to the majority of network administrators (62 percent), is more essential than cloud application speed (38 percent)
- Overprovisioning was admitted by 66% of respondents in the last 9-12 months
- Overprovisioning is mentioned for a variety of reasons, including network slowness (62 percent), database service delays (61 percent), application code problems (58 percent), and not wanting to anger consumers (34 percent)
- Overprovisioning led to the discovery of additional performance bottlenecks, according to 78 percent of respondents
“The alternative to overprovisioning is installing smart, end-to-end network and application monitoring tools that deliver high-performance network and user experience monitoring,” said CISSP Mary Roark, Vice President, Cybersecurity Strategy, Accedian. “In today’s hybrid cloud and software-defined environments, virtualized network monitoring tools that empower SOC teams with metadata and machine learning analytics can assist to identify unusual activity on a network. Even better, using a tool that serves both network operations and security operations teams will simplify operations, reduce costs and help to prevent overprovisioning and the introduction of more risk by addressing network performance issues in the same platform as security.”
