IT Managers lack visibility into almost half of network traffic

In fact, nearly a quarter of them are blind to as much as 70% of their network traffic.

Sophos’s global survey, The Dirty Secrets of Network Firewalls, polled more than 2,700 IT decision-makers from midsized businesses in 10 countries, including the US, Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, UK, Australia, Japan, India and South Africa – and found that, unsurprisingly, 84% of respondents agree that a lack of application visibility is a serious security concern.

Without the ability to identify what’s running on their network, IT managers are blind to ransomware, unknown malware, data breaches and other advanced threats, as well as potentially malicious applications and rogue users. Sophos pointed out that network firewalls with signature-based detection are unable to provide adequate visibility into application traffic due to a variety of factors, such as the increasing use of encryption, browser emulation and advanced evasion techniques.