While the joint efforts of security and IT operations ultimately determine an enterprise’s security strength, the individual goals of these two groups are often misaligned, thanks to conflicting responsibilities and different metrics for evaluating and rewarding successful performance. The result is what industry analysts are calling a “SecOps gap,” where poor collaboration between these two groups results in unnecessary security vulnerabilities, business-system downtime, excessive labor costs and challenges meeting regulatory requirements.

These problems came to the forefront in an exclusive new survey by Forbes Insights and BMC of senior security and IT managers at large enterprises in North America and Europe. A series of in-depth interviews with executives on both continents uncovered best practices for balancing security, IT system uptime and regulatory compliance. A common theme emerged from the survey and the one-on-one interviews: today’s enterprises need a modern game plan that uses technology, people and processes to close the SecOps gap.