An increasing the number of security-related tools and personnel is ineffective at resolving operational and security problems at scale. The status quo of siloed operations is just not sustainable.
Before the cloud and before the digital transformation, the methods used to manage operations and security made sense at the time they were established. With the advent of networked multi-cloud environments, security and digital operations have become much more complicated. People and teams still want to defend their territory in the digital world. The top three reasons why cyber resiliency has not increased, according to IBM’s most recent cyber-resilience report, are:
- Problems with silos and turf cannot be solved
- IT and security infrastructure that is not cohesive
- Absence of transparency regarding applications and data assets
These are all problems with operations. Operations have become dispersed, with tasks split between IT, finance, sales and marketing, DevOps, and SecOps, among other lines of business.
Chief information officers (CIOs) struggle to maintain compliance with business and data policies while ensuring that information is accessible to those who need it.
The Ever-growing Cyber Threats
All organizations face a daily flood of data across the multitude of tools and systems they rely on to run their businesses and yet that data is siloed too. At the same time, threat actors are increasingly sophisticated and determined. Ransomware is practically a legitimate business perpetrators have “customer” help desks and arrange payment terms for their victims. Adding tools and people to address security doesn’t scale and can no longer solve operational and security issues effectively. The status quo of siloed operations is just not sustainable.
The average midsize company, according to IBM’s research, uses more than 45 security tools, not including those for network, cloud, or application monitoring. Most are made to perform a specific task, which they may do incredibly well. However, when combined, they run the risk of being a management nightmare or ignored, which is unfortunate because their data is valuable.
Operations and Security Must Work Together
It’s time to adopt a new perspective on how to handle operational integrity and security. Start by identifying the similarities between ops and security organizations:
Availability: Ops is in charge of making sure all users who require access can access business systems and information. For the right data to be accessible to the right users at the right times on the right devices, security teams are in charge.
Risk: The operations perspective of risk is concerned with keeping everything operational to prevent downtime and subpar performance, which undermine business productivity and efficiency. Risk is viewed by security organizations in terms of data loss, manipulation, and business damage.
What if digital operations and security collaborated on a common data and analytics platform rather than operating independently, managing numerous tools, working in silos, and duplicating efforts? What if that platform helped them achieve their shared goals of ensuring availability across infrastructure and assets while lowering risk?
The goal of digital operations and security is to keep the company running as securely as possible. Organizations must develop a consistent “digital + security” strategy, backed by a team that works together and makes the best use of the available resources, both human and mechanical, to accomplish this shared mission.
Security and Operations Need a Common Operational Picture
The cost of maintaining operations consumes a disproportionate amount of budgets for many businesses, leaving less money available for innovation and growth. And it doesn’t work to lower risk (of downtime or breaches). The only solution is to quicken digital transformation by putting less emphasis on risk management and more on risk prevention. Converging all operations and security data onto a single platform is the only way to accomplish that.
Also Read: 5 Strategies for Financial-Crime Risk Management
Enterprise operations that are fully secured, dependable, and practical are made possible by combining operations and security with an information-sharing platform.
Businesses can ultimately create a common operational picture by ingesting and analyzing all the operational and security data (COP). To obtain the context and intelligence required to effectively manage risk, security teams must then connect the dots between ops and security data. Organizations can then identify pre-incident situations, rank them according to business risk, and correlate them with enough context for proactive resolution by applying advanced analytics and machine learning. Security and operations can always cooperate. CISOs and CIOs can demonstrate damage avoided, demonstrate “goals saved,” and quantify value by doing this. They also gain insights.
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