We had a great time at Black Hat in Las Vegas this year. With an attendance of over 20,000 of the world’s most security-savvy professionals across the information security spectrum, we were right at home.
Insights from the 2019 Black Hat Survey
For the second year in a row, we conducted the Vectra superhero survey at Black Hat. The survey is a quick six-question poll that helps us understand the current cloud adoption and top-of-mind concerns of attendees.
Just like last year, the people surveyed were a mix of chief information security offices (CISO), security researchers, security architects, security operations center (SOC) personnel, and network operations center staff.
Key Takeaways on Network Transformation
Not surprisingly, the biggest takeaway this year was the ongoing transformation of the network as more and more organizations embrace hybrid-cloud deployments. This is happening in the form of lift-and-place deployments as well as cloud native apps. This in turn bring a new set of challenges for SOC team, as they look at ways of maintaining visibility and control over the network in the cloud.
AI Adoption and Superhero Preferences at Black Hat
But first things first. This year, Iron Man was dethroned from the title as the most popular Avenger with our attendees. In Tony Stark’s place is now Captain America. Iron Man shared second place with Deadpool. However, supernatural intelligence still remains the number-one superpower that would be most useful to security professionals.
This is echoed in the trend of AI adoption within organizations, and especially so in SOCs. A good AI network detection and response (NDR) tool can automate tedious incident response tasks to augment SOC manpower. Teams that use AI to augment the work of security analysts achieve greater levels of efficiency than those who do not.
Mainstream Cloud Adoption Trends
Of everyone surveyed, 56% now have more than 40% of their workloads in the cloud. Only 5% reported that they currently have no cloud implementation. But when it comes to visibility into cloud deployments, 46% reported lower or no visibility in comparison to their on-premises networks.
The Role of NDR in Cloud Transformation
With the increased threat surface that a hybrid environment brings, and the new skillset required for developers and it-admins to securely configure cloud solutions, it’s no wonder that SOC and CISOs are wishing for more and better visibility into their cloud networks. In fact, 57% of those surveyed said gaining visibility into their cloud footprint and detecting the early signs of an attack are the most important priorities.
Many organizations now rely on NDR solutions to help them gain this visibility by detecting threats in their networks in the cloud and on the ground—without being overburdened by noisy alerts.
The Cognito network detection and response platform from Vectra excels at collating numerous alerts to create a single incident or campaign that provides a forensic a chain of related events. This lets you to harness the collective power of data, artificial intelligence and automation to eliminate breaches.
If you'd like to learn more be sure to reach out to us.