The complexity of cyberattacks on businesses and the difficulty in proactively protecting dynamic and flexible networks, as well as the devices and data used in daily business processes, have increased the need for businesses to deploy integrated and automated security technologies.

A consolidated approach integrates and automates traditional security technologies into a holistic security fabric that spans and adapts to expanding and highly elastic networks by tracking and defending devices distributed across an organisation’s ecosystem, says cybersecurity multinational Fortinet products and solutions senior VP John Maddison.

The digital footprints of businesses and individuals continue to expand rapidly, including as a result of new multicloud strategies, besides others, which increases the attack surface.

“Nearly every device is a target, and virtually everything can be used to instigate a cyberattack. “Threats are becoming more intelligent and attacks are increasingly automated, and are simultaneously becoming extremely difficult to detect,” he says.

Predictions for Internet of Things technologies point to exponential growth, with estimates that there will be 4.3 Internet-connected devices for every man, woman, and child on the planet by 2020.

Users insist on connecting many of these to their business networks to check email and sync calendars, while also browsing the Internet and checking on how many steps they have taken in the day. The list of both work and leisure activities these devices can accomplish continues to increase, and the crossover between these two areas presents increasing challenges to information technology security teams.

Further, increasingly sophisticated and evolving cyberthreat challenges are rising in the context of a global shortage of skilled cybersecurity professionals, he highlights.

A survey conducted by the Information Systems Security Association and analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group shows that 70% of organisations confirm that the global cybersecurity skills gap has affected them, with 54% claiming they experienced a security event in the prior year as a result of having insufficient security staff or inadequate training.

The problem is going to get worse, with estimates that the shortage will grow to a 1.5-million-person shortfall globally by 2020, up from 1-million today.

“Cybersecurity skills shortages are exacerbated by the growth in the number of security software solutions. Organisations have geared up to combat new security threats, adding dozens of security solutions from various vendors across their distributed networks. “The problem is that these different tools were not designed to work in transient and borderless environments.”

These solutions tend to work in isolation from one another and usually have separate configuration and management consoles, as well as requiring manual intervention to correlate data between them in order to detect many threats.

Integrating and managing the growing number of these disparate systems consume valuable time and manpower, which is in short supply for most organisations.

“Companies must be aware of the threats and their impacts and implications to develop an effective cyberdefence strategy,” concludes Maddison.