Security leaders face challenges while transforming information technology (IT) infrastructures to incorporate digital services that have become inseparable from everyday activities, such as completing job tasks or consulting a doctor.

With highly distributed architectures and a broader threat landscape resulting from an ongoing digitization of previously physical experiences, organizations are turning to a variety of solutions to help manage complexity and address widening IT skills gaps. However, survey results also indicate pitfalls ahead that, if ignored, will prevent organizations from becoming more responsive and agile.

Digital transformation brings about cybersecurity challenges

The 2022 State of Application Strategy Report from F5 asked nearly 1,500 IT decision-makers to explore the security challenges related to digital transformation. Cybersecurity leaders rank visibility across different environments as the top challenge for those deploying applications in multiple clouds, followed closely by consistent security.

Top report findings include: 

• Most organizations lack critical insights: 95% of organizations have plans to mine operational data for insights they hope to use to improve the user experience and drive business growth. However, 98% of respondents indicate that they are currently unable to extract needed insights from their existing systems. 
• Complexity is becoming untenable: With 93% of respondents using cloud-based as a Service offerings and 84% planning to move workloads to the edge, associated challenges range from overlapping security policies and fragmented data to the deployment of point solutions that ultimately add complexity, increase fragility or inhibit performance.
• Business performance valued over security: Even as complexity has increased the number of potential failure points, performance remains paramount, with more than three-quarters (76%) of respondents admitting that — given a choice — they’d turn off security measures to improve performance.

Taken together, these results indicate that IT decision makers are still coming to grips with limitations tied to modernization, business imperatives, and deployment methods as they reap the benefits of digital transformation. To explore more findings, download the report.