Effect of data on Federal agencies' policies.

A survey commissioned by Splunk has found that 63% of public sector organizations “struggle with leveraging data to detect and prevent threats,” compared to 49% of private sector entities.

Data sharing challenges.

The survey concludes that these difficulties of analyzing data “directly impact partnerships between the public and private sectors and their ability to share intelligence:"

“The survey found two-thirds (66%) of public sector agencies have difficulties leveraging data to mitigate and recover from cybersecurity incidents and half (52%) of the sector have issues leveraging data to inform cybersecurity decisions. This visibility challenge was also relatively high within the private sector, sharing a similar majority opinion (56% and 50%), showcasing consistency across industries. Another area of concern, both private and public sector respondents noted disparate data sets inhibit agility and real-time response to security events (84% private sector and 56% of public sector).”

Cybersecurity priorities.

Despite the disparity in leveraging data for security, the survey found that public and private sector organizations have very similar priorities for cybersecurity. The top three cybersecurity priorities for both sectors are “improving threat response/remediation capabilities,” “improving detection of emerging threats (e.g., ransomware),” and “improving user security awareness.”