The 2020 State of Breach Protection Survey – Call for Participation

With rapidly growing security needs and respective budgets, it
is now more essential than ever for security decision-makers to
zoom out of the ‘products’ mindset and assess their security stack
in light of the overall breach protection value that their
investments return.

The 2020 State of Breach Protection Survey (click here to
participate^[1]) attempts to map out for
the first time how breach protection is practiced and maintained
globally – what are the common products, services, concerns, and
challenges that are most common amongst organizations.

Any security professional filling the anonymous salary survey
questionnaire, organised by The Hacker News in partnership
with Cynet, will get a free copy of the survey report once it
is released in January 2020. You can complete the questionnaire
here^[2].

Why is that important? Because unlike ‘endpoint
protection,’ or ‘next-generation firewall,’ breach protection is
not a strictly defined category and most chances are that – again,
unlike these previous two examples – there is no budget in your
organization that’s designated for ‘breach protection,’ even while
this is the ultimate goal of all your cybersecurity
investments.

Changing from security products to breach-protection oriented
mindset is essential to break away from the comfort zone of the
known and currently practiced security in an organization, pushing
you to ask the really hard questions continuously.

The hard questions are not whether the SIEM operates adequately
or whether the EPP was successfully deployed across all endpoints
in your environment, but rather – is my environment truly secured
despite the products, workforce, and service providers I engage?
And if not, what can I do about it?

And the best place to start is to get firm and fact-based
insights into what others are doing. We all face the same attacks
and need to confront them within a pool of available resources.
That makes crowd-sourcing this knowledge an extremely powerful
tool.

Going straight to the point – what’s in it for you by
filling the survey? For the most part, you will be benchmarking
your variation of breach protection with a comparison set which is
far wider than your standard cycles. Let’s assume that your
interpretation of breach protection includes, for example, EDR on
your endpoints, CASB for your SaaS apps with both streaming alerts
to a cloud-based SIEM, and engaging a 3rd party MSSP for incident
response and investigation.

Is that a common model? If not, what is and how might it impact
your onward decision making? Gaining robust knowledge on how your
role and industry peers handle challenges similar to yours can
provide you with new perspectives.

From a different angle – what do you perceive as your
greatest challenge? Is it recruiting a skilled security team? Or
perhaps capturing the management mindset to approve the budgets for
all the products and services your environment requires? The best
supporting evidence to a budgetary claim is showing how the request
is on par with the industry standards.

So it’s a win-win. Complete the survey and do a valuable
service, both to yourself and to the wider community of security
decision-makers.

Participate in the 2020 State of Breach Protection
Survey here.
^[3]