Security is also becoming metric-driven. Businesses use a number of variables to measure their performance. This includes the time to detect a threat from the point when it entered the environment and time to contain a threat. Other metrics are around the time to remediate, patch and analyse post-event. All of these metrics are important for delivering an effective security detection and response posture.

IT leaders are kept awake at night for many reasons, especially as the attack surface continues to expand. Moving to a cloud environment tends to rank among the top concerns, but businesses are also looking at ways to secure mobile devices, operating systems and databases. Each have their own points of vulnerability and need to be updated. Security is an end to end architecture that will extend from the data centre, to the desktop, mobile and/or IoT device. Businesses should consider security concerns from the outset of any ICT project. They should also review security policies and escalation procedures continuously.

Moving from a physical to a virtualised environment creates many security concerns in general. Businesses will continue to migrate workloads to cloud over the next two years, but the requirement for cost-savings, agility and scale needs to be balanced with security, managing risk and achieving compliance. Lines of Business are big consumers of cloud services and many IT departments need to strike the right balance between speed, agility and end user experience with security and compliance.