New AlgoSec Study Uncovers Application Connectivity Management Challenges are Impacting Security and Business Agility

Survey findings indicate complexity of critical business application connectivity as well as data center and application cloud migrations

October 29, 2013

Boston, MA – AlgoSec, the market leader for Security Policy Management, today announced the results of “Examining the Impact of Security Management on the Business,” a global survey of 240 information security professionals, network operations and applications owners. The survey was conducted to determine how security management affects organizations’ agility with regards to connectivity of critical applications in the modern data center. A key finding in the study shows that while many organizations are planning to migrate critical business applications from physical infrastructure to private, public or hybrid clouds, more than two-thirds of organizations encounter application connectivity disruptions or outages during data center migration projects.

“Critical business applications fuel today’s data centers, but security teams lack visibility on how security activities impact the business,” said Nimmy Reichenberg, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, AlgoSec. “As a result, provisioning connectivity for data center applications is time-consuming, severely hampering business agility and increasing the risk of business disruptions and security breaches caused by errors in firewall configuration… and as our study shows, these challenges are magnified when migrating applications or entire data centers to the cloud.”

Key findings from “Examining the Impact of Security Management on the Business” include:

• More data center applications, less business agility – Over 32 percent of respondents reported more than 100 critical business applications in their data center and 19 percent said they had more than 200 critical applications. Half of the respondents require more than 5 weeks to deploy a new data center application, while a 25 percent require more than 11 weeks.
• Fast and furious application connectivity updates, but processed slowly – Nearly half of organizations (45 percent) have to manage more than 11 business application connectivity change requests every week, and 21 percent must manage more than 20 changes per week.  However, 59 percent say it takes more than 8 hours to process each application connectivity change request with 31 percent saying it takes more than one business day per change.
• Decommissioning data center applications is painful… and risky – When decommissioning applications in their data centers, 59 percent of respondents said they have to manually identify which firewall rules to change, while 15 percent leave the unnecessary access rules in place, creating security risks.
• Prioritizing network vulnerabilities by business applications is a new requirement – Organizations want the ability to prioritize network vulnerabilities by business application. Nearly half (48 percent) of respondents want to view risk by the business application versus 31 percent by network segment or 21 percent by server/device.
• Firewall audits require increased man-hours – Seventy-four percent of respondents said they spend more than 1 man-week on firewall audits per year and over 46 percent spend more than 2 man- weeks per year taking resources and time away from more strategic and valuable efforts of the business.

To learn about all of the survey findings, you can download the full report and review the Infographic.

About AlgoSec
AlgoSec is the market leader for security policy management, enabling organizations to manage security at the speed of business. The AlgoSec Suite of products automates management of complex policies across firewalls, routers, switches, secure web gateways and more. Bridging traditional gaps between security, network and application teams, the AlgoSec Suite improves business agility, increases security and ensures continuous compliance.

More than 1000 of the world’s leading organizations, including 15 of the Fortune 50, rely on AlgoSec for faster security provisioning of business applications, simplified security operations and improved protection against cyber-attacks.

AlgoSec is committed to the success of every single customer, and offers the industry’s only money-back guarantee.

For more information, visit www.AlgoSec.com.

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