Welcome to your cyber-therapeutical session. We will start with a few short questions to help us determine your current cyber-state. Can you please describe your attack surface? How protected are you feeling today? Are all your security controls configured correctly?
It’s not easy to be trusted with the organization’s security. Being behind the steering wheel of cybersecurity operations but with limited ability to turn it and control it. Resources shortage, proliferation of security challenges, and the everchanging business needs make it look like a mission impossible sometimes.
The human factor plays a significant part in assessing the organization’s overall security posture and responding accordingly. On the other hand, it is the same human factor responsible for 99% of breaches (per Gartner’s quote). To settle this juxtaposition, security vendors need to reduce the inherent complexity of managing many security solutions separately. They should adopt a unified approach for managing the security posture of the entire security stack from a single platform. This way, security teams can enforce the corporate policy across the entire organization consistently while reducing the overhead of managing disparate security products.
What is Security Posture
Security posture refers to the overall position in which organizations hold their cyber-defenses against cyberattacks. It represents the ability to protect all networks, endpoints, applications, services, and information from potential vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and exploits.
It first began as a Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) solution, which rose to greatness as an answer to the growing problem of misconfigurations in the cloud – a derivative of the surge of cloud deployments and data center workloads. With the increase of cloud instances and resources, organizations had to monitor their cluttered cloud environments, configurations, and services and be able to apply the required security policies to protect the business.
Visibility as a Key Value
The cloud infrastructure is dynamic in nature. Keeping the cloud secure, first meant to gain visibility to all the assets in the environment, their logged activity, and all security controls that are tuned to protect those assets. Once you gained visibility, you needed to continually monitor the cloud infrastructure to identify and respond efficiently to security gaps. This included monitoring of the vendor’s security best practices and the most common regulations and standards (HIPPA, NIST, etc.) to make the organization’s security posture resilient to whatever attackers throw at it.
Re-evaluate security posture management
The migration to the cloud changed the way we think about modern organization infrastructure. We have learned that we must continuously analyze, detect, and dynamically respond to threats. To achieve that, we must hold different best practices for different security configurations and services. We learned that we must map our everchanging configurations and deployments to have complete visibility of the resources we protect. But why stop there? The modern organization’s complex infrastructure is way too diverse to focus only on its cloud manifestation. CSPM approach has already proven its efficacy in containing the cyber risk misconfigurations and security gaps held in the cloud and even in applications and SaaS services. So why not employ it for the entire organization’s infrastructure?
One Platform to rule them all
It is time to use the security posture management methodology and apply it to the entire organization. This means deploying a lightweight solution platform integrated with the entire security stack to map the organization’s infrastructure (including all assets and the different levels of protection required for each), the cybersecurity controls, and the current exposure level to threats (i.e., the private threat landscape of the organization); All normalized to a unified language, under one roof to provide security teams with enough information to identify, prioritize and remediate security gaps and cyber threats across the entire organization infrastructure.
Once you gain visibility, security teams can easily manage their entire security posture from a single location, holistically treating the security stack from technological, business operations, and security practices perspectives. This unified security posture management platform augments security teams’ capabilities in responding efficiently to threats, including continuous analysis and contextualization of the current threats and postural gaps, issuing relevant alerts, and optimizing cybersecurity controls based on best practices, regulatory standards, and business needs.
