Threat intelligence is critical for businesses, study shows

Threat intelligence, IoT technologies and geopolitical threats are three major areas of interest for security-minded businesses moving forward, a PricewaterhouseCoopers representative said during a presentation at the 2016 DefCamp conference in Bucharest.

Businesses are embracing cyber-security spending as a means to facilitate business growth¸ according to a new PWC study. Companies are also moving to an agile model of cybersecurity, embracing solutions like data analytics and real-time monitoring, managed security services, advanced authentication and open-source software.

As more products and services become connected to the Internet, there”s an increasing need to proactively address cybersecurity and privacy risks.

“The IoT, for instance, is a low-hanging fruit for security researchers, they can find passwords fairly easy,” said Kereszturi Laszlo, manager at PwC Audit.

“A cyber-security program has to be constantly improved, to align with evolving business security functions, and one way to do it is through the cloud,” he added.

63% of businesses run their IT operations in the cloud, the study shows.

We”re seeing almost an explosion in companies considering the use of cloud to store critical business processes and functions like accounting, finance, operations and human resources,” the study reads.

When it comes to cloud cybersecurity, 51% of businesses use big data analytics to identify threats and incidents. Real-time threat intelligence helps companies become aware of the risks and understand the tactics used by their adversaries. And thanks to the cloud, all the data can be aggregated and shared from a single location.

Cloud-based cybersecurity can be augmented with machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze network activity and amalgamate threat and log information, then parse this data in real time to create actionable intelligence,” the paper says.

The study was conducted on more than 10,000 business and IT executives from 133 countries.