Nothing is certain except death and cyber-attacks. Adversaries keep finding new, innovative ways to exploit vulnerabilities. It seems like there hasn’t been a single day without hearing or reading about a major cyber-attack or breach. Indeed, cyber-attacks have become an integral part of our reality (and dated back to the dawn of the internet). This is why finding the right strategy and the right set of tools to protect your business, its operations, and the expanding perimeter has become more crucial than ever in establishing the resilience the organization deserves.
However, each solution we stack up introduces new dashboards, analytics, and knowledge. And all must be integrated into the existing security stack. Thus, investing in many security solutions can create the challenge of managing disparate, siloed solutions from multiple vendors. The result is inadequate security posture with security gaps.
This is the main reason why 75% of Organizations Are Pursuing Security Vendor Consolidation.
The dynamics between innovations in cyber-attacks and cyber defense grease the wheels of the cybersecurity market. Security vendors continually develop new “tempting” solutions to provide the just about right amount of feeling of certainty needed to deal with the everchanging scene of cyber threats. This is the main reason the security market will remain for the foreseeable future “in a steady state that is always consolidating but never consolidated.”
Increased Spend
Cybersecurity is always a good investment. But investing in many security solutions creates a two-pronged challenge: The overhead of managing disparate solutions from multiple vendors. This function necessarily involves investing heavily in a large and knowledgeable IT team – in-house or through a managed services provider. This is to allow for continuous monitoring, tuning, and mitigation in today’s agile and shifting IT environments. Secondly, the resources each product requires to maximize functionality are steadily increasing. Most organizations end up relying on vendor default configurations, resulting in a potentially inadequate security posture with security gaps. These challenges raise the question of cost-effectiveness for every security product the organization procures to strengthen its security. Proving the ROI of security products is achieved not only by the number of data breaches that have been thwarted. It also by the operational overhead each product requires. If the result is overburdened, security teams that fail to handle misconfigurations, security gaps, alerts, and complex investigations, organizations should consider a better way to optimize the potential of their security infrastructure and operations.
The myth of Sisyphus
Like Sisyphus, who was condemned to repeat the same task of pushing a boulder up a mountain only to see it roll down again, security engineering and operations teams spend an exorbitant amount of time on tedious tasks. There are too many security procedures to follow, dashboards to manage, alerts to handle, and new features to learn. These time-consuming and repetitive actions require manual labor. They require more time, training, and insight than are available to keep up with optimizing the overall security posture. As the numbers of data breaches keep soaring, the employee turnover rate, skills shortages, burnout, and low morale represent a growing challenge to every organization. This situation juxtaposes the fundamental organizational goal of optimizing the security posture and the actual ability to achieve it.
The Sweet Spot
Reports on the latest breaches, ransomware, and software vulnerabilities are major drivers for selling cybersecurity solutions. But fear of the next security breach does not ensure maximum protection. The exercise of the business’ checks-and-balances system will always limit its fortification due to risk/cost considerations. The risk/cost ratio has a double meaning too. On the one hand, the ever-changing threat landscape reveals new vulnerabilities every day. So businesses must respond quickly to avoid potential harm that might befall them. On the other hand, the business will not tolerate a maximum-security approach if there is a chance it will disrupt its operations. Playing both sides of the fence might yield a rigid security posture with limited ROI for every security solution purchased.
To overcome these challenges, security teams need to continuously adjust the cybersecurity controls while proactively monitoring both security logs, alerts, and the health of every security product deployed in the organization. This is crucial to understanding if their protection level is up to par. Also, what the impact on the business operations in case a there’s a need to modify a certain configuration. Finding the sweet spot between maximizing the security posture and reducing business disruption is a strenuous effort. This is where organizations can leverage machine learning to automate repetitive manual tasks, gather postural insights, and restore the balance between business uptime, security posture, and human effort to maintain them.
exploit vulnerabilities
Veriti is a consolidated security platform that integrates with the security stack to continually and proactively monitor exposure to threats and remediate security gaps across the organization’s infrastructure.
Using machine learning algorithms, Veriti automatically analyzes threat configurations and correlates them with sensor telemetries, security logs, and threat intelligence feeds to provide contextual, actionable insights that:
- Remediate security gaps and misconfigurations proactively before they are exploited.
- Optimize security controls to address immediate risks without impacting business applications
- Identify security controls impacting business applications with related IT malfunctions and help security teams quickly analyze scope and remediation options.
Veriti’s configuration-aware consolidated security platform helps organizations maximize the value of their existing security investment proactively without sacrificing business operations. It amplifies the efficiency of security teams by providing a single platform to automatically analyze, detect, triage, and remediate postural gaps and offers complete visibility into the entire security stack, the overall preventative maintenance level, and active vulnerabilities.
