Today, too many organizations continue to work with dated, complex and inefficient security infrastructures, with some systems containing more than 10 different categories of cybersecurity technologies from multiple vendors. In fact, many CISOs claim to have anywhere between 35-65 different security technologies in their environment. For the most part, this comes from a history of bolting on security products to address issues that pop up, one by one. The result is too many tools, oftentimes with overlapping capabilities. Despite these many security layers, data breaches are continuing to happen.
The problem is that while the technology stack itself has become far too complex, the need for more necessary skilled resources has greatly increased. The number of tools and alerts continues to overwhelm security operations professionals, who struggle to keep up – let alone effectively detect and respond to actual threats. As such, attacks are going undetected for days, weeks or even months.
To combat this, traditional security operations must move with the times and modernize. Security professionals are limited to silos of visibility within networks, endpoints and clouds, as well as a barrage of alerts – including false positives that slow the ability for threat response – and manual efforts to triage and investigate alerts without skilled personnel. While SIEMs were designed to improve the security stack, by bringing together data from multiple security tools, they often produce even more noise and slow down the visibility to respond. This is a far cry from what’s required to detect and respond against today’s sophisticated attacks.
The time has come for understaffed and overwhelmed security staff to be handed back the power to properly leverage their expertise – and simplifying the security stack is a crucial first step. The ideal scenario is for a unified security stack that offers full visibility and delivers complete, contextual perspective across the entire enterprise environment. This will speed up detection, empower threat hunting and automate response – providing accuracy, clarity and certainty for security professionals.
While there are clear cost, security and sanity benefits to simplifying the cybersecurity stack and fully using the solutions that remain, doing this successfully – and without reverting back to the old habit of piling solutions on top of each other – will rely on the adoption of threat-focused ways to objectively measure the expected value of cybersecurity investments.
On top of intelligent, and automated, threat detection and response software that increases time-efficiency for internal security teams, solutions that give power back to security professionals include managed detection and response, and even outsourced threat research reports of specific campaigns, so that every aspect of the security infrastructure is overseen by those that are best suited to manage it.
Managed detection and response provides the talent, data and tools to proactively hunt threats, speed up investigations and stop detected threats in their tracks. They are designed to protect the most complex environments by leveraging threat detection and response software. Combine this with accurate and actionable intelligence, and security teams will be in a much stronger position when it comes to properly securing the enterprise.
In the end, streamlining the security stack will drive a long overdue sea change in the cybersecurity industry. As security professionals are freed from the restraints of complex security infrastructures, the power will be firmly back in their hands to get on with the main job in-hand – to utilize their expertise and defend the enterprise and the critical assets within.