Apr 6, 2021 Cybersecurity is managed by a dedicated department among half (58%) of enterprises in the META region, while only 25% of companies of this size have an in-house Security Operation Center (SOC) responsible for continuous monitoring and responding to security incidents. Yet, improving internal specialists’ expertise was listed as the most important reason in the META region to increase the IT security budget over the coming years. Businesses, and large enterprises in particular, require skilled professionals to protect from ever-evolving cyberattacks. Combining IT and security functions within a single department can be convenient and speed up many processes to this end. However, this approach also contradicts the segregation of duties principle, as the same people would be responsible for both day-to-day IT initiatives as well as the evaluation of corresponding security risks.