More IT Organizations Leverage Analytics to Bolster Security

When it comes to IT security, there is no shortage of information, which turns out to be a big part of the problem.

To deal with this issue, it turns out that IT organizations have been increasingly turning to a variety of analytics, data warehouse and business intelligence applications to sort through mounds of IT security data.

A new survey of 434 North American enterprises with 5,000 or more employees conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Sensage, a provider of security information management (SIM) tools, finds that 67 percent of these organizations say that applying analytics tools to security issues is now a high or critical priority.

According to Sensage CEO Joe Gottlieb, this greater appreciation for analytics shows that IT organizations are maturing rapidly in terms of their approach to IT security. Instead of being reactive, Gottlieb says that IT organizations are clearly starting to get more proactive about looking for clues to identify security vulnerabilities and undiscovered breaches.

The challenge, says Gottlieb, is finding some way to filter all the data they have in a way that provides some actionable information. To that end, Gottlieb says Sensage doesn’t see itself getting into the analytics business as much as providing a way for existing analytics applications to take more advantage of the security data that Sensage collects.

While it’s apparent that IT organizations are taking IT security more seriously than ever, it’s also pretty clear that they have a long way to go in terms of closing the time between when a vulnerability or breach manifests itself and when it is repaired. The good news is that the tools to accomplish those goals are slowly coming together in a way that could have a dramatic impact on improving the overall state of IT security.