Leveraging Partner Technologies To Create A Powerful Security Stack

By Geetanjali Sethi, Inspira Enterprise

The security landscape grows increasingly complex – not only are threats constantly evolving but so are the solutions aimed at combating them. Building and managing a cyber stack can quickly snowball into an all-consuming task. And it’s not just a matter of throwing more money at the problem – even a big budget isn’t going to solve it.

It’s time to re-think your toolkit and whether the solutions work together to deliver an outcome. That said, with so many companies on the market, each hawking their own security solutions, it’s difficult to navigate the landscape. Fortunately, expert help is available.

Examining The Challenges

The real problem across the industry, the topic of conversation at all the recent conferences, is that security executives honestly were initially more focused on trying to find the right technology than on the people and process issues. People, processes, and technology need to work in tandem to achieve your business-based outcome.

The challenge is that with the influx of all these security point products, they’re often underutilized, not tuned correctly, or not properly deployed. This might be due to a longer deployment time, a lack of skills, or other issues the team isn’t aware of. And security teams can become very frustrated because there are a lot of tools getting dumped on them, decisions being made from the top – leaving out the process and the people part of this – and a lack of the right skills. The cybersecurity skills shortage continues to be a significant challenge for organizations.

There’s an increasing number of security vendors on the market, all touting their solutions as the next big thing or the answer to your cybersecurity problems. But the reality is that no one solution will fix it all. So, what’s happening is that many tools are being layered on top of each other.

CISOs and security leaders are spending a ton of money, but the number of breaches continues to rise. Buying tools isn’t enough – and it’s often redundant because many of these tools have overlapping functionality. On average, organizations are using 45 cybersecurity tools on their networks, according to The 2020 Cyber Resilient Organization Study by the Ponemon Institute. That’s just the average; many companies are using far more.

Remember that the larger your stack, the more demands you have in terms of having the skills for it, and that puts a lot more pressure on security teams.

Taking Security Strategy Beyond A Sprawl Of Tools

To move beyond a mere mishmash of solutions, you need tools that integrate well – that can “talk” to each other. Your cyber threat management platform needs to include protection, prediction, detection, incident response, and remediation; but if you start buying tools for each of these in isolation, they’re not going to all work together and will not deliver the desired outcome.

 

Cyber hygiene is required to protect the environment, like properly implementing and configuring hardware and software, and updating and patching software. Although this seems basic, many organizations don’t do it.

Getting to this point requires first looking at what you have today to figure out what needs to happen to optimize your security stack. You need to understand your threat surface. If you don’t know what your vulnerabilities are, you might be paying for products that address infrastructure you don’t even have.

You need to critique each solution you currently have. What is it meant to address, how does it do it and does it have a distinct purpose? Is it redundant to another solution? Does it integrate well with other tools? Do you have the right processes implemented to manage the tools effectively?

Another important question to ask is: Do you have the right skills to manage all of this? Do you really want to be in the business of managing your security stack, or do you want to be in the business of managing your security outcome and/or being the recipient of the outcome? If you answer “yes” to the latter, this is where a partner can come in.

Looking To A Partner

A managed security service partner can play a key role in reducing tool fatigue, skill shortage, and costs – and help evolve processes to build mature programs. Managing security solo is a massive task; you can’t be an expert in every area. A service provider you trust can focus on the core areas of security and enable you to focus on the business – even managing the IT security staff.

It’s okay to outsource the fundamentals. But you need to remain responsible for reviewing the outcome. This model facilitates your team’s focus on business and relies on managed security service providers (MSSPs) to manage the day-to-day operations. With the right partner, you can learn from the best practices implemented for other similar organizations in the industry. In the cybersecurity world, we are “better together.”

A Winning Team

As the threat landscape expands and attack vectors multiply, organizations have many important choices to make to ensure their cybersecurity. There are countless industry leaders in a vast array of cybersecurity technologies, and it can be difficult for customers to select their partners. By working with a trusted MSSP that leverages multiple partner technologies, customers can benefit by having best-in-class technologies without the headache of selecting them individually. MSSPs excel at integrating multiple partner technologies into a single, seamless package solution to provide everything their customers need to stay secure.

About The Author

Geetanjali Sethi is the managing director of cybersecurity services at Inspira Enterprise.