Integrating Security and Compliance Teams to Curb Modern Risks

Colin Fallwell
Sumo Logic
Learn more about Sumo Logic

As the world's technology rapidly evolved and threats skyrocketed in the cloud, the need for security and compliance teams to come together to protect organizations and their customers has never been more important. Unfortunately, this hasn't happened yet.


In partnership with Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), we polled 204 technology and business leaders in North America from more than ten industry verticals to investigate this theme. The research found that most organizations recognize the importance of managing both compliance and security functions in-house. Nearly 83% of respondents said that a corporate employee was responsible for information security and 88% said that IT audit and compliance functions are also handled internally.

Yet, while most organizations run internal compliance and security teams, their status is not weighted equally. Compliance imperatives typically drive security priorities. However, organizations' combined security and compliance postures will be better served when both teams work together, and budgets and investments should reflect that equal importance.

Key takeaways from the research include:

Security and compliance ownership and budgets are splintered

Security and compliance ownership and budgets are splintered. They often operate with different teams, budgets and investment levels, but they need to work together to better protect the organization's posture instead.

■ 47% said that IT owns the security budget, while 11% noted that compliance is the security budget owner.

■ In the future, 86% of those surveyed plan to make a significant investment in compliance solutions and data privacy, while just over half (52%) will make a significant investment in a security management suite.

Compliance challenges amplified by rapidly growing IT environments

Compliance challenges are amplified by rapidly growing and global IT environments with different regulatory climates.

■ 39% of respondents said having multiple IT environments with different requirements is their primary compliance challenge.

■ 40% of organizations have postponed security projects to address regulatory compliance concerns.

■ 68% believe their regulatory compliance programs are a competitive differentiator.

■ 75% said that they are using existing tools or evaluating new tools to address data privacy.

compliance needs driving cybersecurity priorities

Organizations' compliance needs are driving cybersecurity priorities, causing teams to alter security strategies to align with requirements.

■ 67% said that data privacy regulations like GDPR, CCPA or changing data controls were their biggest compliance challenges.

■ 38% said that data security and privacy was the greatest security challenge in their organization

■ 25% stated that information security projects are dependent on compliance projects

■ 76% said that compliance has completely or significantly shifted their security strategy

Compliance and security teams must work together

Compliance and security teams must work together to best manage a mature and robust program, while maintaining numerous attestations and controls globally.

■ 89% indicated that the priorities of the security and compliance teams were aligned.

■ 85% stated that the security tools used adequately address compliance considerations.

■ 59% indicated that data privacy regulations have impacted their approach to security.

Integrated Security and Compliance Solutions

This survey also signaled the growing demand for integrated security and compliance solutions that increase visibility while mitigating emerging threats and privacy regulations. When organizations prioritize DevSecOps, they can better maintain compliance, especially as they are expected to comply with multiple standards, including PCI, HIPAA, PII, SOC and GDPR, in highly regulated industries.

It is undeniable that all organizations will benefit from incorporating a security-centric culture and fostering better collaboration between security and compliance teams. Organizations must adopt solutions that provide real-time monitoring for continuous compliance and help maintain system security.

Colin Fallwell is Field CTO of Sumo Logic

Related Links

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

The Latest

How AI Agents Are Reshaping DataOps for the Always-On Enterprise

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

AI Deepfakes: Rethinking Trust in the Workplace

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Nine in Ten Enterprises Plan Cloud Data Repatriation amid Rising Cloud Costs and Data Sovereignty Mandates

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Why ITOps Need Right-Sized AI, Not Bigger Models

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

The End of Reactive DevOps: AI-Driven Observability for Zero-Defect Digital Systems

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

5 Takeaways from the Observability Forecast for Media and Entertainment

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Why Moving Off the Cloud Is the Easy Part and What Comes Next Is Where Things Get Hard

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 24: Network Observability Tool Sprawl

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

Capacity Isn't a Guess: Observability-Driven Sizing for On-Prem Databases

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

5 Security Principles Every Entrepreneur Should Apply to Leadership

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...

Integrating Security and Compliance Teams to Curb Modern Risks

Colin Fallwell
Sumo Logic
Learn more about Sumo Logic

As the world's technology rapidly evolved and threats skyrocketed in the cloud, the need for security and compliance teams to come together to protect organizations and their customers has never been more important. Unfortunately, this hasn't happened yet.


In partnership with Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), we polled 204 technology and business leaders in North America from more than ten industry verticals to investigate this theme. The research found that most organizations recognize the importance of managing both compliance and security functions in-house. Nearly 83% of respondents said that a corporate employee was responsible for information security and 88% said that IT audit and compliance functions are also handled internally.

Yet, while most organizations run internal compliance and security teams, their status is not weighted equally. Compliance imperatives typically drive security priorities. However, organizations' combined security and compliance postures will be better served when both teams work together, and budgets and investments should reflect that equal importance.

Key takeaways from the research include:

Security and compliance ownership and budgets are splintered

Security and compliance ownership and budgets are splintered. They often operate with different teams, budgets and investment levels, but they need to work together to better protect the organization's posture instead.

■ 47% said that IT owns the security budget, while 11% noted that compliance is the security budget owner.

■ In the future, 86% of those surveyed plan to make a significant investment in compliance solutions and data privacy, while just over half (52%) will make a significant investment in a security management suite.

Compliance challenges amplified by rapidly growing IT environments

Compliance challenges are amplified by rapidly growing and global IT environments with different regulatory climates.

■ 39% of respondents said having multiple IT environments with different requirements is their primary compliance challenge.

■ 40% of organizations have postponed security projects to address regulatory compliance concerns.

■ 68% believe their regulatory compliance programs are a competitive differentiator.

■ 75% said that they are using existing tools or evaluating new tools to address data privacy.

compliance needs driving cybersecurity priorities

Organizations' compliance needs are driving cybersecurity priorities, causing teams to alter security strategies to align with requirements.

■ 67% said that data privacy regulations like GDPR, CCPA or changing data controls were their biggest compliance challenges.

■ 38% said that data security and privacy was the greatest security challenge in their organization

■ 25% stated that information security projects are dependent on compliance projects

■ 76% said that compliance has completely or significantly shifted their security strategy

Compliance and security teams must work together

Compliance and security teams must work together to best manage a mature and robust program, while maintaining numerous attestations and controls globally.

■ 89% indicated that the priorities of the security and compliance teams were aligned.

■ 85% stated that the security tools used adequately address compliance considerations.

■ 59% indicated that data privacy regulations have impacted their approach to security.

Integrated Security and Compliance Solutions

This survey also signaled the growing demand for integrated security and compliance solutions that increase visibility while mitigating emerging threats and privacy regulations. When organizations prioritize DevSecOps, they can better maintain compliance, especially as they are expected to comply with multiple standards, including PCI, HIPAA, PII, SOC and GDPR, in highly regulated industries.

It is undeniable that all organizations will benefit from incorporating a security-centric culture and fostering better collaboration between security and compliance teams. Organizations must adopt solutions that provide real-time monitoring for continuous compliance and help maintain system security.

Colin Fallwell is Field CTO of Sumo Logic

Related Links

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

The Latest

How AI Agents Are Reshaping DataOps for the Always-On Enterprise

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

AI Deepfakes: Rethinking Trust in the Workplace

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Nine in Ten Enterprises Plan Cloud Data Repatriation amid Rising Cloud Costs and Data Sovereignty Mandates

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Why ITOps Need Right-Sized AI, Not Bigger Models

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

The End of Reactive DevOps: AI-Driven Observability for Zero-Defect Digital Systems

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

5 Takeaways from the Observability Forecast for Media and Entertainment

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Why Moving Off the Cloud Is the Easy Part and What Comes Next Is Where Things Get Hard

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 24: Network Observability Tool Sprawl

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

Capacity Isn't a Guess: Observability-Driven Sizing for On-Prem Databases

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

5 Security Principles Every Entrepreneur Should Apply to Leadership

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...