TD SYNNEX report: 75.4% of Japanese firms face ‘security fatigue’

A survey conducted by TD SYNNEX involving 410 IT executives and security professionals at Japanese companies with over 300 employees reveals that 75.4% of respondents experience ‘security fatigue.’ This condition is defined as the exhaustion and sense of reaching operational limits caused by managing multiple security tools and responding to a high volume of alerts.

The report identifies several structural drivers of this fatigue, including the increasing complexity of IT environments due to cloud services and generative AI, as well as a lack of visibility into threats. Notably, the issue extends beyond tool proliferation; 87.3% of respondents reported a high level of dependency on specific individuals (personalization of operations), and 78.8% stated that labor shortages are significantly impacting security operations.

To address these challenges, respondents indicated a preference for automation and improved prioritization of alert responses (36.3%), followed by enhanced threat visualization and dashboarding (26.1%), and the integration of tools into unified management platforms (17.8%). The findings suggest that sustainable security requires moving beyond simply adding tools toward organizing dispersed information and reducing the operational burden on human personnel.