One of the biggest challenges for IT security teams is trying to keep pace with the staggering number of new threats and attack surfaces. There are also an increasing number of tools and strategies recommended to handle this challenge. Cut through the complexity with these three crucial strategies for improved cybersecurity.
Implement identity and access management (IAM)
Managing the human factor of data access is crucial for securing an organization’s move to hybrid and cloud environments. Users and their identities are among the most vulnerable links in a network. Securing access to resources across a globally connected web of users—including employees, vendors and customers—who are accessing IT environments when and where they choose requires strong IAM strategies. As you develop your IAM strategy, be sure to involve key stakeholders to enable successful identification of business drivers, desired outcomes and success criteria.
Identify and reduce your cloud vendor risk
As your organization moves to cloud services and applications, it’s important to identify the associated risks. Your data will have increased exposure, regardless of the security controls the vendor has in place. The reality is that you can’t outsource risk and your best defense is a strong offense. A solid understanding of your data is a good place to start. Use a data classification strategy to help you identify the varying values of your data so you can treat it accordingly. Structured properly, your data-classification project can help you maintain the appropriate levels of confidentiality, integrity and availability of your data.
Use data intelligence for better threat response
Collecting data has become an inherent part of your security operations center (SOC) and you probably recognize that you could be using that data to better advantage. But, how do you move from simply amassing data to compiling useful analytics for a proactive security approach? The best next step for your team depends on where you currently are on the path to optimizing data intelligence.
For organizations that have mastered data collection, the next step involves data normalization and data enrichment. Integrating a security information and event management (SIEM) solution into your SOC operations can quickly add value to your data, providing context and alleviating strain on IT resources.
If your team is already using a SIEM solution, integrating a user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) tool into your security stack can leverage your data to provide a new layer of detection by recognizing suspicious behavior. Layering in a security orchestration and automation response (SOAR) platform can produce advanced analytics your team can use to identify anomalies earlier, optimize threat hunting activities, and automate attack response for routine tasks typically performed by SOC analysts and engineers.
Improving your security posture in 2020
Strengthening cybersecurity in 2020 is about more than protecting data—it’s about neutralizing potentially devastating attacks and pursuing customer trust. If you’d like to see a deeper dive into trends we believe will impact security in 2020, check out our article here.
Sirius has the security expertise and leading-edge technology partnerships to help you design and implement the best strategic path for your organization. Contact us today to get started.
