The Rise of Proactive Security
The Rise of Proactive Security
As cyber resilience becomes an ever more important condition of business success, cybersecurity teams have arrived at a crossroad. As threats continue to evolve and attack techniques change, do they spend more budget on new tooling in the hope that it keeps the threats at bay, or is now the time to overhaul their current cybersecurity mindset and move towards a more proactive approach to mitigate risk?
Too often, today’s cybersecurity strategies are highly reactive. Digital transformation and macroeconomic challenges have led to fast-changing IT priorities for organisations, and cybersecurity teams have had to be agile to secure networks as they go.
These pressures, limited resources, and highly sophisticated attackers have all contributed to an environment in which building and maintaining a strong security posture can feel like a game of space invaders.
With cloud strategies creating large and hard-to-manage attack surfaces for modern organisations, response times are everything. This isn’t news to anyone who works in IT and security, but unfortunately, simply knowing that a cyber threat needs to be found and remediated as quickly as possible is not enough to override the pressures facing teams.
As IBM’s latest annual Cost of a Data Breach report found, organisations take an average of 204 days to identify a breach, before taking a further 73 days to contain the threat. For organisations that have outsourced part of their security strategy to a Managed Security Service Provider, this overall ‘data breach lifecycle’ was found to be 21% faster.
Embracing proactive strategies
Proactive security strategies change the narrative – organisations are able to put themself in pole position in the race against threat actors. Security teams are not only better equipped to handle potential incidents when they occur, they are able to secure themselves against future breaches.
Whether there’s a breach on the network or a new zero-day vulnerability needs patching in your applications, real-time and continuous risk monitoring is the key to embracing a more proactive, security strategy.
For an in-house team, already struggling with time and resources, this level of security monitoring is incredibly challenging to achieve. Organisations can choose to dedicate their security team’s time to near-constant monitoring, or to devote a large proportion of security spend towards security tools. But these approaches eventually lead to alert fatigue in teams and distract from the other vital tasks that they need to perform to keep IT systems operational – thereby playing into the hands of the hacker.
Outsourcing managed detection and response to a trusted partner is the best way to strengthen security posture by enabling real-time visibility without overburdening existing security talent.
Putting trust in a SOC
A Security Operations Centre (SOC) is the ultimate proactive security solution. Organisations with a SOC effectively have a 24/7 team of security analysts monitoring and securing their network, taking security processes beyond the traditional and offering full visibility with extended detection and response (XDR) capabilities.
When implemented as part of this wider security culture overhaul, having a SOC for threat detection and remediation enables in-house security teams to focus on more proactive strategies and minimise alert fatigue, contributing to talent retention efforts.
This heightened level of threat visibility also helps to drastically reduce spend. This year, the average cost of a cyber breach is higher than ever at nearly £3.5 million. While proactive strategies take some time and investment to implement, catching and remediating threats as early as possible is a financial no-brainer.
If you’re interested in finding out how a SOC could work for your organisation, get in touch with us. We have some of the highest qualified security professionals in the country ready to help you take your first step towards proactive security.
