Organizations have a large stock of data, and these stocks exist within siloed systems and applications. This requires a lot of manual effort by highly skilled data scientists, engineers and analysts to derive value from all that data. It requires huge responsibility to effectively converge, manage and use such enterprise data.
Preparation of data is an introductory and essential task, but it prevents engineers from focusing their time on the high-value tasks such as identifying security gaps or storytelling that can improve the cyber security posture of an organization.
Thus, bringing all your security data at one place in a consolidated fashion is important. An enterprise security data fabric platform can help, and to be successful, you need to understand what type of data you need to gather and its source.
What is Security Posture?
Security posture refers to the strength of an organization's security structure over its networks, data and systems, both hardware and software. Your security posture measures the extent to which your organization is vulnerable to cyber attacks or data breaches. This also includes how an organization reacts when an attack or breach occurs in real-time.
This brings into question the need of data back up to reduce the impact of data breach.
Strong Security Posture Protects you from?
To build a strong security structure, you need to address the ways undertaken to protect your organization. Security attacks and data breaches often take place from a malicious party and sometimes they can occur unintentionally.
Data Breach
Data breach take place when confidential or sensitive information is viewed or shared without authorization. Some data breaches can be intentional where the attackers targets network vulnerabilities, email phishing, etc. On the other hand, data breaches can be unintentional, if a piece of hardware containing sensitive information is lost, or granting wrong access permissions.
Cyber Attack
Almost all cyber attacks are performed with some deliberate malicious intentions. Cyber attack occurs when an organization's computer network is targeted with the aim of disrupting, disabling or controlling the stored information. These attacks are executed by external actors such as hackers or criminal groups or by people within the organization including disgruntled employees, contact workers.
Vulnerabilities and Threats
The development of strong cyber security posture can help to surface significant vulnerabilities and threats. A security vulnerability is a weakness in the network of an organization. Vulnerability can vary from a weak password requirements to improper working of operating systems. Vulnerability is something that is already present in an organization's network.
On the other hand, threats are hypothetical instances that could negatively affect an organization because of security vulnerabilities. To protect your organization against data breaches and cyber attacks, you need to understand and analyze potential threats and their likelihood.
Data in Right Places
A security data fabric approach assists in transforming raw data into analysis-ready datasets, streamlining data analysis workflows, enabling data quality and integrity, and finally facilitating a stronger security posture. Security experts can create an initiative to implement a security data fabric.
The proposed initiative requires you to:
- Evaluate your data state
- Understand that it needs the right data feeds
- Identify data sources across the business
- Understand how you can collect these datasets
- Understand how to combine, normalize and transform this data for greater business context and insights
- Build reporting on this layer and share with stakeholders
Knowing the Data you need
Steps to Strengthen your Cyber Security Posture
- Regular Assessment of Security Posture- The first and foremost step to create a strong security posture is to know where your organization stands when it comes to security risks. The initial assessment may be time-consuming, whereas it is easier to protect against the already known risks.
- Consistent Monitoring of Networks and Software for Vulnerabilities- Once you identify the risks, it is important to continue to keep an eye on your organization's network vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities can change in terms of seriousness due to the shift in an organization's software usage and as time goes on. In addition to this, new vulnerabilities could develop at any point, in the ever-changing landscape of cyber security. To cope with this, do continuous monitoring of networks and key business systems to quickly patch software when vulnerabilities are discovered.
- Assignment of Specific Risks- There can be a large number and wide variety of potential risks that the organization could face. Thus, it is important to spread out the ownership of these various risks among departments. Once you define and prioritize the risks, assign them to proper departments. Thereafter, specific managers should be tasked, within the assigned department, for owning and monitoring each risk. This way, every risk can be tracked by a knowledgeable party and responsibility can be distributed throughout the organization.
- Regular Analysis of Gaps in your Security Controls- The fundamental part of creating a resilient organization and ensuring your company to meet its regulatory compliance obligations is to build out security controls. Controls include specific policies, procedures, processes and technologies chosen by the organization to mitigate certain risks and meet compliance requirements. It is essential to test your security controls in consistent manner and look for potential gaps in these controls. Along with this, regularly analyze gaps in your security controls, making you proactive in protecting your organization from cyber attacks and data breaches.
- Define Some Key Security Metrics- From a cyber security standpoint, you need to select a few metrics, not too technical, to frame a picture of the current threat landscape. These metrics help you to establish a baseline for security posture and health. These metrics can include:
- Detected intrusion attempts
- Incident rates
- Vulnerability patch response times
- Severity level of incidents
- Incident response time and time of remediation
- Number of users broken out by application/data access level
- The overall volume of data the business generates
- Develop an Incident Response Plan- A cyber security incident response plan (CSIRP) refers to a document that gives instructions on the way to respond to serious security incident. Make a proper planning of the response plan so that you could respond to an issue as quickly and efficiently as possible. In the detection and analysis phase, you could identify the incident that occurred and how to respond to it. The vital part of your response plan is to respond to the identified threat- eradicating the threat and recovering from the attack. After the incident has been stopped, your organization should reflect on what has happened, assess the severity and damage, reevaluate the effectiveness of your response plan and proceed with the notification process.
Final Thoughts
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