How Security Teams Can Transform Data into Action
For today’s cybersecurity professionals, the biggest problem isn’t a lack of data – they have plenty of it. They just don’t know how to transform it into actionable insights.
The problem isn’t a lack of defense tools either.
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For today’s cybersecurity professionals, the biggest problem isn’t a lack of data – they have plenty of it. They just don’t know how to transform it into actionable insights.
The problem isn’t a lack of defense tools either. Quite to the contrary: Teams juggle on average 83 different solutions from nearly 30 vendors, inviting unnecessary complications by taking a “no stone unturned” approach. In fact, more than half of executives say complexity represents the biggest impediment to security operations.
About three-quarters of executives feel that their security employees’ workloads are excessive. Widespread alert fatigue significantly contributes to the issue, as the average organization receives thousands of alerts daily. But up to 98 percent of them are non-critical – i.e. false positives. Teams are drowning in a sea of information, without a sense of how to extract meaningful data from it all.
They need data based on real-time action to accurately protect their security landscapes. Security teams are only able to protect what they know about with the latest information they have. In order to comprehensively protect their organization, security teams need the data from their tools to tell them what to do and help them drive priorities.
To achieve this goal, organizations should partner with an outside, managed provider who understands how to make data more meaningful. With artificial intelligence delivering an additional boost by sifting through the overload of alerts and contextualizing/prioritizing them, the provider can work with the security team to thwart attackers before they ever have a chance to do extensive damage.
With this in mind, here are five steps that security teams can take to transform an abundance of data into actionable insights:
Break down data silos for greater visibility: Security teams can’t protect the data they can’t see. Organizations rely on multiple security tools and platforms that generate vast amounts of data. To effectively assess and protect their networks, security teams require a unified view of all incoming data.
Prioritize the threats that matter: If organizations try to protect their attack surface from every threat imaginable, they will just end up spending money on tools they don’t need and creating even more alert fatigue. Security teams need to focus on the malicious campaigns, urgent vulnerabilities and threat actor groups that are actively targeting their organization.
Correlate data to provide operational insights: After breaking down the silos between tools, organizations must marry the threat intelligence to the information gathered from their tools to identify and address risks.
Automate responses: Security operation center (SOC) teams are experiencing an influx of threats amidst resource challenges, with the cybersecurity skills shortage. Because of this, automation is the only way to keep up with adversaries. Automation ties all these things together and allows security practitioners to look at the entire playing field and take specific actions that actually increase their defensive posture across cloud, on-prem and hybrid environments.
Introduce exposure management: Taking a holistic, continuous approach requires visibility across the entire organization. Exposure management enables security teams to assess and enhance their defense surfaces, ensuring organizations are prepared for any threat that enters their network.
Recently, we worked with a global enterprise that, prior to implementing exposure management, spent four weeks correlating all of their data to answer their board/C-suite and determine defensive readiness and confirm they were protected against the latest threat. Once they changed their approach and implemented an automatic, comprehensive and continuous solution, they were able to cut the time down from one month to minutes.
Once security teams apply the steps above, they can gain peace of mind knowing that the known threats are accounted for and all known gaps are filled. By already having exposure management in place, it sets organizations up for successful incident response programs in the event of an unknown threat entering the network. Since detection logic, controls and visibility are being tracked properly, it’s less surface area to worry about when an adversary infiltrates the network.
Many believe that exposure management is provided by another security solution; however, those solutions only provide a sliver of the information needed to operationalize data effectively. Properly implementing exposure management allows security leaders to adopt a holistic and continuous approach, empowering security teams to set up their security stack in a way that allows for ongoing assessments and improvement of the defense surface. It needs to include every feed and environment to encompass the full value of all products and provide the connective tissue. This adds more bandwidth and a better compliance posture across the security team.
At the end of the day, it’s about increasing the efficacy of an organization’s security posture and helping focus and fine-tune a team with the proper set of resources to help them focus on what matters most.
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