Infoblox global survey sheds light on protecting network from blind spots

A 2022 global state of security survey from Infoblox, the leader in cloud-first networking and security services, highlights the security concerns, fears and costs from 1 100 IT respondents in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, United Kingdom, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain, United Arab Emirates, Australia and Singapore.

"The hybrid workplace is more reliant than ever on cloud-first technologies, but blind spots have emerged," says Aric Ault, Senior Director of Channel for Infoblox EMEA.

“The explosion of employee-owned technologies on the corporate network feeds IT teams’ growing fears over losing direct security controls and network visibility. This has become all the more concerning as breach costs top 1 million USD for 43% of surveyed organisations.”

Ruan du Preez, Vendor Alliance Director: SA & SADC at Exclusive Networks Africa, which distributes Infoblox solutions in sub-Saharan Africa, adds: “This is an extremely valuable report, especially as it sheds light on changes in working and e-commerce that took place worldwide as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The number of participants represents a very strong global reach and allows us here in South Africa – where we also adapted rapidly to the shift in online functionality – to extrapolate from the extremely current lessons that have been learned.”

“The survey objectives were to gain greater visibility into the global state of security, including the impact that remote workers and customers have had on organisations that were forced to adapt to rapid change,” Ault notes. “Participants shed light on their top concerns, breach costs and anticipated investments.”

Key findings from the survey include:

• The surge in remote work has permanently changed the corporate landscape with the additions of VPNs and firewalls, employee-owned devices and cloud and on-premises DDI servers to manage data traffic across the expanded network.
• The hybrid workforce reality is causing greater concerns with data leakage, ransomware and attacks through remote access tools and cloud services.
• Fifty-three percent of respondents experienced up to five security incidents that led to at least one breach.
• Organisations are buying cloud-first security tools to protect their hybrid environments, with 40% of respondents planning to purchase a DNS security product over the next year.

“With corporate networks expanding cloud-first, Infoblox helps prevent blind spots on the network," says Ault. "Our DDI (DNS/DHCP/IPAM) solutions give customers network visibility down to the singular device level, which shines a light on anomalous traffic that security tools can’t see.[1] This metadata is a foundational step for security hygiene, because you can’t fight a threat you can’t see. DNS security enables IT teams to block malicious sites and speed up threat hunting. It is small wonder that DDI and DNS security products are gaining popularity with IT teams.”

“Infoblox embeds security everywhere, thereby enabling people to work securely from anywhere,” adds Du Preez. “There is no doubt that the dramatically increased need to work remotely during the global pandemic increased threats around the world. However, equally, security organisations have risen to the challenge. DDI enhances awareness of what’s happening in your network to help avoid costly errors and provide global cross-platform visibility.” 

Please click here to access the full report.

[1] DNS – Domain Name System; DHCP – Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol; IPAM- IP address management