Threats abound, and of course, as our possession grow more valuable, our threats become scarier.
Just a few years ago, defence was the only strategy to adopt against these threats, but today, the rapidly changing landscape has made early detection critical. Preparedness for the attacks is crucial, and so is implementing monitoring mechanisms to detect early stages of attacks.
It is now established that early detection helps so security is now strategising to gear up for detection of any kind of suspicious activity in addition to defences already set up in enterprise. There are agencies constantly scanning for targets and damage. This 24X7 surveillance is a job that needs close attention and full attention, and is best outsourced. In fact it is becoming increasingly important for enterprises to outsource security monitoring activities to vendors who do it in a focused manner.
While investments are mandatory and applications are necessary, they do not seem enough to help enterprises cope with security threats. What then is the answer? More apps and higher budgets? That defeats the whole purpose, doesn’t it? An intelligent move would be getting business and IT apps on one platform; it saves costs, increases business efficiencies, and adds teeth to both. Getting security operations into one integrated centre will help add teeth to the fight against threats. Integrating vulnerability data within the network allows for early detection and hence is a good defence mechanism can be put in place as well.
For many enterprises, the way forward needs a long hard look at how different activities can be integrated within the security organisation to facilitate a single view and a coordinated defence mechanism can be built around it, within the network. Then, we need to integrate vulnerability tests and look for ways to prevent threats by working around this intelligence. What is critical is early detection of threat and preparedness for the attacks, implementing monitoring mechanisms to detect for early warning and not waiting for the outage. This is possible if all the intelligence is integrated within the company network, allowing security teams to process collective memory identify vulnerabilities and keep the preparedness updated.
That requires a consolidated data and knowledge on the previous attacks, and then a concerted effort to study the vulnerability that caused it, understand how it can be mitigated and put in an effort to be armed, if not lethal.
Creating a security history, accumulating a threats and mitigations data base allows learnings that can be an enterprise’s only defence very soon. Outsourcing this activity is a good idea, one that helps save costs as well as opens up the resources available to doing more business critical activities. A single view and a coordinated defence mechanism built as a security strategy, and integrated with vulnerability tests within the network, can actually help prevent some of the persistent threats, giving some measure of relief.