75% of Businesses Waste Just As Much Time on False Positive Security Threats, Study Finds

It’s good to go about your business with an abundance of caution, but sometimes this abundance of caution can lead people to see threats where they simply do not exist. In cybersecurity, this is actually quite easy to see happening, as cybersecurity is such a multi-faceted topic. But how much do these false-positive security reports wind up costing organizations?

A report from Fastly and Enterprise Strategy Group found that a whopping 75% of businesses spend just as much time, if not more, on false-positive security concerns compared to real, actual threats. That’s a huge number and one that has severe ramifications. The same report found that 46% of all downtime for companies utilizing the cloud and API-driven technology was caused by false-positive security concerns, costing a business in this sector close to $3 million a year. You don’t need us to tell you that this is an unacceptable loss, especially when it’s caused by the aforementioned abundance in caution.

Another interesting trend here is that this increase in false positives reduces confidence in security applications, leading many organizations to disable certain features. For example, TechRepublic cites that 91% of surveyed organizations either disabled or reduced the capabilities of their security software in response to the many false positives they experienced. You can imagine that this does not help matters, as disabling these features only makes it more difficult to detect the real threats.

The report does suggest that there is one solution to this issue that can help organizations overcome these false positives: implementing a unified solution that can take into account the cloud and its various APIs. Many of the challenges that come from false-positive security concerns stem from the fact that many organizations use what the report calls “a patchwork of security tools,” so replacing them with one unified solution rather than hoping for compatibility between your various solutions is vastly preferable.

At BNMC, rather than creating the “patchwork” network security discussed in the report, we work with our clients to ensure that all security tools play nice with each other and develop a security strategy that takes into account all possibilities.

Ultimately, false positive security alerts can be troublesome, but they are better than the real deal. If you want to shore up your defenses and ensure that real security concerns don’t break your business, we can help you implement a powerful unified security tool that can help you discern the true issues from the false ones. We can even do all the heavy lifting for you by monitoring your network for security discrepancies and the like. To learn more, reach out to us at (978) 482-2020.