A new survey of IT and security professionals reveals that 72 percent of organizations have experienced five or more network security incidents in the past 12 months.

Frost & Sullivan conducted the survey of Global 2000 companies in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany, for network and IoT security company ForeScout. It asked questions about security breaches and the effectiveness of certain network security tools.

Regardless of region or technology, IT and security administrators revealed that their networks have significant blind spots, underscoring that too many organizations deploy network security technologies in silos with little or no communication between products and teams, according to the survey.

Also, respondents reported low confidence in their patch-management agents (37 percent), mobile-device management agents (35 percent), encryption agents (28 percent) and antivirus agents (27 percent). An agent is a small piece of code installed on an endpoint that associates the endpoint to the enterprise network.

Rob Greer, ForeScout’s chief marketing officer and senior vice president of products, tells Channel Partners that the channel has the opportunity to better understand the needs of their customers — specifically regarding the desire for comprehensive security automation.{ad}

“The data found that an average of 60 percent of organizations say they are ready for automation on a variety of their controls, including antivirus, advanced threat detection (ATD) and firewalls,” he said. “Hackers are wired to think of ‘sleuthy’ tactics to breach a network, and companies need to get security right 100 percent of the time to prevent such attacks. If organizations aren’t automating their security controls, they’re falling behind.”

IT and security teams would like to be able to customize settings, according to the survey. However, a security tool has to be effective out of the box and has to remain effective when integrated with other tools in a layered cyberdefense.

“Vulnerable entry points are widespread, and the rise of IoT devices is only increasing the security attack surface,” Greer said. “Automation can help orchestrate technologies to eliminate network blind spots, giving organizations true visibility and actionability into their connected devices.”

Too much reliance on agents can bring a false sense of security — agents can easily be misconfigured or disabled, making it difficult to track BYOD or mobile devices, he said. This can result in a loss of complete visibility into the endpoint and compromise the overall security of a network, he added.

Next-generation network access control (NAC) identifies, inspects and controls all network-connecting devices, including wired, wireless and remote endpoints, and ensures that managed endpoints are compliant with security policies, according to the survey. The value of next-generation NAC has moved beyond the simple access authorization offered by earlier NAC offerings, it said.

“As our survey points to, a foundational element of network security is knowing what is on the network, and how each infrastructure device and endpoint is related,” Greer said.