Security and technology teams are under increasing pressure to strengthen their organization’s cybersecurity posture. The need to improve defenses and business resilience is urgent. According to the National Cybersecurity Alliance, ransomware attacks, identity theft, assaults on critical infrastructure and AI-powered scams are all expected to escalate in 2025. And, over the next few years, the global cost of cybercrime is projected to surge to nearly $14 trillion.
Businesses can’t improve defenses or achieve resilience by relying on fragmented processes, disparate systems, siloed security, development or cloud operations teams. The way forward is through embracing strategic platform integration. Also known as platformization, this unified approach delivers benefits beyond enhanced cybersecurity:
- Cost Optimization – Automated workflows help reduce operational overhead and free up resources for more strategic initiatives.
- Organizational Excellence – Breaking down team silos fosters a culture of collaboration, trust and shared responsibility across security, development and operations teams.
- Compliance – Streamlined processes and real-time insights help businesses stay inline with key standards and frameworks, such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).
According to a new IDC Spotlight paper, A C-Suite Guide for Platformization: Integrating Cybersecurity with an Enterprise Workflow Automation Platform, many chief information officers (CIOs) and chief technology officers (CTOs) are already evaluating the benefits of adopting a platformization strategy. More specifically, they are examining the value of integrations across the enterprise technology stack, bridging IT, security, risk and governance.
Strategic platform integrations offer organizations a powerful, dual-purpose advantage. They can help drive continuous improvement while enhancing productivity and optimizing costs. For example, the deep integration between Palo Alto Networks and ServiceNow’s platforms delivers intelligent, end-to-end visibility and tracking so that teams can act swiftly on critical data, streamline workflows and accelerate cross-functional collaboration.
Transforming Business Resilience Through Integrated and Automated Processes
Another key takeaway from the IDC Spotlight paper, sponsored by Palo Alto Networks and ServiceNow, is that platformization makes it easier for businesses to adopt and enable generative AI (GenAI) agents. That, in turn, can help them set a course for an agentic AI future.
GenAI is rapidly emerging as a key driver in accelerating cybersecurity investments and transforming how teams operate. With GenAI-powered insights embedded in integrated platforms, like ServiceNow and Palo Alto Networks, security teams can predict and mitigate threats more proactively. And IT and operations teams can focus on minimizing disruption and ensuring business continuity.
IDC’s paper underscores how the integration of Palo Alto Networks and ServiceNow’s platforms create a unified foundation for addressing modern cybersecurity challenges, enabling organizations to enhance resilience, streamline processes and reduce costs, by linking security and operational workflows.
Streamline Incident Response
Automating the end-to-end lifecycle of cybersecurity incidents helps ensure threats are prioritized, analyzed and resolved efficiently. For example, when the security operations center (SecOps) team detects a vulnerability, automated workflows can seamlessly trigger alerts to relevant teams, enabling proactive remediation before risks escalate.
This approach can help organizations move toward agentic AI-driven security by reducing the time needed for human teams to analyze and respond to cyberthreats. This happens over time, as GenAI agents evolve from simply assisting teams to autonomously mitigating threats based on historical incident data and real-time network insights.
Enhance Collaboration
Shared data and integrated processes are the foundation for more effective collaboration between IT, security and operations teams. When a cybersecurity alert is triggered, these teams gain access to the same real-time intelligence. That, in turn, enables them to work together seamlessly to prioritize, investigate and resolve issues faster.
This combination of platform integration and GenAI capabilities reduces manual effort, enhances response accuracy, and helps teams anticipate risks before they escalate. As IDC highlights in its paper, platformization eliminates traditional “swivel-chair” workflows, where security and IT teams must manually transfer information across disconnected systems that can slow down response times and leave businesses exposed to evolving threats.
Improve Visibility
Integrated dashboards provide comprehensive, real-time insights into multicloud environments, compliance risks and overall organizational health, helping teams to identify and address security gaps. Consolidating security, IT operations and risk management data into a “single pane of glass” also allows decision-makers to quickly identify and act on potential vulnerabilities, policy violations and performance bottlenecks before they escalate.
A cybersecurity platform integrated with an enterprise workflow automation system can correlate security alerts with cloud infrastructure health, compliance frameworks and IT service performance, ensuring that security and IT teams have a holistic, actionable view of potential threats. Automated risk scoring and AI-powered analytics enhance this capability by prioritizing incidents based on their potential impact on business continuity and compliance.
A Call to Action for Security and Technology Leaders
IDC underscores in its Spotlight paper that “combining an AI-native cybersecurity platform with an enterprise workflow automation platform helps accelerate business transformation, resiliency, risk mitigation, and organizational excellence.” The strategic integration of Palo Alto Networks and ServiceNow’s platforms exemplifies this approach by enabling security and technology teams to strengthen themselves:
- Fortify their organization’s cybersecurity posture.
- Drive operational efficiencies across the enterprise technology stack through the use of AI and automation.
- Enhance business outcomes by aligning security with the organization’s broader goals.
Don’t let fragmented systems and outdated processes hold your organization back from modernizing security, achieving business resilience and meeting transformation goals. Download IDC’s paper, A C-Suite Guide for Platformization: Integrating Cybersecurity with an Enterprise Workflow Automation Platform, for an in-depth look at how AI-focused cybersecurity with AI platform integration can help unlock and accelerate business value.
Watch the on-demand webinar from IDC, Palo Alto Networks and ServiceNow to learn more about how a unified foundation for addressing modern cybersecurity challenges can enable you to enhance resilience, streamline processes and reduce costs.