According to a new Forrester study commissioned by Cyware, 64% of respondents note that sharing cyber threat intelligence between their organizations’ security operations center (SOC), incident response, and threat intelligence teams is limited. Chief information security offers (CISOs) must better understand the technology and data access challenges preventing their SOCs from enabling the holistic defense required to secure modern organizations.

Organizations cite several data silos and data access issues that hinder their ability to achieve collective defense. Seventy-one percent of security leaders report that their teams need access to threat intelligence, security operations data, incident response data, and vulnerability data, yet 65% of respondents find it very challenging to provide security teams with cohesive data access. Top obstacles to unifying technologies include cross-team collaboration (55%), data silos within security teams (47%), discovering and accessing data (45%), and functional silos within security (45%). These common hurdles shine a spotlight on the need for organizations to better unify their security teams, processes, and technologies to bolster defenses and more proactively defend their assets.

Those who acknowledge the consequence of not unifying are turning to security tools and functions, such as security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) technologies, to support efforts to reach collective defense. Due to difficulties unifying data access, security teams, and security technologies, firms report several consequences tied to hazardous defense issues, including slow threat response (60%), avoidable data breaches (57%), and avoidable human error (53%). In addition, there are financial impacts experienced because of a lack of security unification and automation, such as high mitigation costs and increased cybersecurity spending (51%), as well as fines and compliance issues (45%).

The continuously evolving, dynamic threat landscape and cross-team collaboration challenges are motivating leaders to evaluate security firms’ existing security approaches and move towards adopting unified collective defense foundations to remain viable.

The study surveyed 339 cross-industry global security leaders to better understand the top challenges preventing organizations from achieving true collective defense. The report demonstrates common data access challenges in the modern SOC and the impact of siloed security operations on threat response efficacy.

Read the full report by Cyware.