Managed visibility and control
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Cyber hygiene
A secure and resilient digital environment relies on security best practices and measures such as regular software patching, system updates, strong password policies and user awareness training. Good cyber hygiene helps organizations reduce the likelihood of successful cyberattacks and minimizes the impact of any security incidents. But the task has become increasingly challenging in a world of distributed clouds and remote workers.
Patching problems
43%of global IT Ops leaders report patching issues.
Research reveals that around two-fifths (43%) of global IT Ops leaders report patching problems with personal devices. And 38% are reducing their reliance on VPNs as a delivery mechanism for remote software updates. Deficient tooling creates serious enterprise challenges including slow or incomplete patching cycles, leaving a large window of opportunity for attackers. This, in turn, triggers security compliance issues and impacts the productivity of already stretched IT teams. Organizations also have to contend with a lack of visibility on their software license management and an inability to reliably distribute software across large volumes of endpoints.
Some of the world’s biggest breaches have been caused by unpatched vulnerabilities, costing victim organizations significant financial and reputational impacts. Software vulnerabilities remain one of the top vectors for corporate compromise. Their volume is growing exponentially every year, providing threat actors with a steady supply of bugs to exploit in attacks. Configuration errors such as insecure passwords open the door even wider. Yet finding and prioritizing these issues can be challenging in large, distributed enterprise IT environments.
Risk profiling and response
No organization is 100% breach-proof. But risks can be limited by risk profiling, which involves identifying, assessing and prioritizing potential risks and vulnerabilities in an organization’s information assets. This helps organizations understand their exposure to various threats and enables them to allocate resources effectively to address the most critical risks. By conducting risk profiling, organizations can identify weak points in their security posture, evaluate the potential impact of different risks, and develop strategies to mitigate those risks. This allows organizations to focus their efforts on protecting their most valuable assets and safeguarding against potential threats.
Exposure
247days on average until a breach is identified and contained.
The key is to react with speed and precision when an incident does occur so that remedial action can be taken quickly to minimize any impact. Unfortunately, that’s not the reality for most organizations, which lack critical visibility into endpoint assets and malicious behaviour. The average time it takes globally to identify and contain a breach today is still way too long. And the longer bad actors are inside networks, the more damage they can do. This leaves businesses faced with mounting risk on several fronts, including:
- Relying on fragmented tools and incomplete and outdated sources of truth
- Lacking visibility of suspicious behaviour
- Spending excessive time in investigation, potentially increasing the risk of exposure
- Mitigating the financial and reputational damage of a serious breach without understanding the true impacts
- Maintaining compliance with a patchwork of data protection laws
- Potentially flying blind in negotiations with ransomware actors
Individual approach
To meet the individual needs of their organization, IT leaders should seek to implement integrated solutions that bridge IT operations, security and compliance. On their own, most organizations will struggle to get this right – and to keep doing so as their inventory changes minute by minute. But by automating asset discovery, they will be in a far stronger position to defend themselves.
A single platform supports this undertaking by providing a shared source of truth, a unified set of controls and a common taxonomy that brings together siloed teams for a shared purpose – to protect critical information and infrastructure. Working with an external provider can be an effective and cost-efficient way to access these benefits and improve the overall quality of both security and operations.
Summary
Organizations face various challenges in the global threat landscape. Good practices in visibility and control, cyber hygiene and risk profiling combine to create a robust cybersecurity framework within organizations. This helps organizations proactively manage their security posture, minimize the likelihood of successful cyberattacks and ensure the confidentiality, integrity and availability of their systems and data.
