Marrying network, security operations saves money, bolsters enterprise defenses

Digital business in 2024 demands technology teams collaborate more to provide access to resources and applications while at the same time protecting assets and data from vulnerabilities and malicious attacks. The convergence of network and security teams marks an emerging best practice among businesses that recognize the benefits of increased collaboration, according to new research from Enterprise Management Associates (EMA).

“We saw in the research that successful partnerships reduce security risk, drive operational efficiencies, and lead to fast resolution of problems on both the networking side and the security side,” said Shamus McGillicuddy, vice president of research at EMA. The research firm calls this collaboration between network operations and security operations as NetSecOps.

Specifically, 43% of those polled pointed to reduced security risk as a benefit, and 40% said operational efficiency is a positive result of the increased collaboration. Some 40% reported the benefit of accelerated mean time to repair (MTTR) of network trouble, and 39% said faster detection/resolution of security issues is a sign of network and security collaboration success.

McGillicuddy leads the network management practice at EMA and hosted a webinar sharing the results of research sponsored by BlueCat Networks, Broadcom, and Endace. EMA surveyed 304 IT professionals in October 2023, and detailed the results in a new research report, “NetSecOps: Examining How Network and Security Teams Collaborate for a Better Digital Future.”

EMA found that 86% of enterprises are seeing increased collaboration between their network and security teams, while 49% of those surveyed have either fully or partially converged their networking and security groups into one group. The trend is clear that the two teams are coming together more often, and EMA found some of the drivers behind the convergence strategy.

The collaboration is driven by specific IT initiatives and technologies, according to EMA. For instance, 40% of respondents pointed to their IT/network automation strategy as a key driver of the convergence. The survey found that 91% of those polled believe that network automation tools are valuable collaboration facilitators. And 94% said they wanted to enable self-service orchestration of networking and security resources by DevOps and applications teams, the EMA survey found. Among the key network and security collaborative automation use cases are:

• Security incident response: 48%
• Threat isolation/remediation: 44%
• Network trouble remediation: 39%
• Compliance reporting: 32%
• Infrastructure provisioning: 29%

EMA revealed several other drivers for increased collaboration. About 31% said hybrid cloud is behind the two teams working more closely. Cloud is a technology area in which network and security teams might have felt they lost some control but now can gain it back. According to the EMA research, nearly 84% of respondents said that public cloud adoption has either significantly or slightly increased collaboration between networking and security professionals. And 88% said it is “at least somewhat valuable for network and security teams to have access to cloud traffic data,” EMA reports.

SASE adoption, in particular, has been noted to require networking and security teams to come together for vendor selection, implementation, operations, and budget allocation. Some 29% identified secure access service edge (SASE) projects as a reason networking and security teams need to be more aligned. Nearly 83% of respondents said that SASE either significantly or slightly increases collaboration between networking and security personnel. While networking teams typically are responsible for SD-WAN implementations, a move to SASE requires equal involvement from security teams.

“Ninety-nine percent of enterprises have adopted SD-WAN, and many are looking to evolve to SASE, and that pulls security into the WAN architecture, which is when the network team has to work with the security group,” McGillicuddy says.

Other technology initiatives responsible for driving greater collaboration include Internet of Things/operational technology for 28% of those polled, multi-cloud architecture for 28%, and remote/hybrid work for another 28%. Business issues that also encourage increased collaboration include IT labor issues and skills gaps for 30% of respondents, new regulatory requirements for 29% of those polled recent cybersecurity incidents for 27%, and 25% indicated that bringing the two teams closer together is also driven by budget challenges.

“People who said they’re only partially converging their networking and security groups are less successful with the collaboration than people who are either siloed or fully converged. So, either do one or the other. Don’t go halfway,” McGillicuddy said. “We also saw in the research that successful partnerships drive reduced security risk, operational efficiency, and fast resolutions of problems both on the networking side and the security side, which are all good arguments for doing this systematically, carefully, and effectively.”