Automation and Integration is Essential to Effective Cybersecurity
We live in a world where both customers and employees expect instant and remote access to data and software functionality wherever they are. This convenience has opened the door to entirely new products, services, and work models. However, ensuring the same door isn’t left ajar for cybercriminals is a growing problem.
Bad actors are continuously developing new attack vectors and finding new software vulnerabilities that allow them to infiltrate networks and access our data. Moreover, the digital acceleration caused by the pandemic and the transition of systems to the cloud combined with technologies like IoT adding new devices to networks only increases the opportunities for cyberattacks.
With this in mind, it is not surprising that the end of 2021 saw cyberattack attempts reach record highs. Compared to 2020, corporate networks around the world saw a 50% increase in attacks in 2021.
To stay ahead of the bad guys, businesses require a fully integrated cybersecurity strategy that offers comprehensive coverage and visibility while also incorporating automation to instantly adapt to emerging threats.
The Growing Complexity of Security
Many companies struggle with the growing cybersecurity threat and having an increased attack surface to protect due to their use of multiple standalone solutions. While platforms like Sonar SaaS incorporate various security solutions and automation into a single platform, most cybersecurity tools specialize in specific protections.
Often a business’s cybersecurity approach is born out of a disjointed decision-making process over several years. As threats emerge and focus shifts, they find new tools to meet the current demand. However, this approach overcomplicates an already complex problem.
A company may have one vendor supplying the firewall, another for cloud data security, another for DDoS protection, and so on. Unfortunately, managing your cybersecurity through an assortment of different standalone solutions offers the worst of both worlds: increased complexity with reduced visibility.
With standalone solutions, businesses must track multiple systems to develop a complete picture. Because of this, it is easy for information and data to get lost, remaining siloed to the respective platform and not contributing to the wider security view. This reduces effectiveness and removes the context needed for a network to stand up to multi-stage attacks.
Cybersecurity works best with a holistic approach. An integrated security solution and everything it contains is designed from the top down to work together seamlessly and provide complete visibility and coverage. Integration means you’re no longer slotting together disparate cybersecurity tools, forcing them to work with one another regardless of their design and implementation.
What Companies Need in an Integrated Security Solution
Integrated cybersecurity allows users to combine everything they need into a single secure solution. This includes:
#1. Data Security
Everything it takes to protect your data from unauthorized access, theft, or corruption. Data security is a large field with a lot to consider, from the physical hardware to encryption, backups, access controls, and much more.
Whether it is for customer privacy, defending intellectual property, or controlling crucial company infrastructure, every business has critical data they need to protect. For a modern business, data security invariably means cloud data security and developing protections for information stored with AWS, Azure, or other cloud service providers.
An integrated approach to data security allows for complete visibility and a full understanding of your critical data, where it is stored, who has access, and how and when it is used.
#2. Application Security
The ever-increasing complexity of security means businesses are choosing to protect themselves at the application level as well as network. With modern applications typically connected to the cloud and available from various networks, there are a growing number of vulnerabilities that require mitigation strategies.
Application security factors to consider include:
- Authentication
- Encryption
- Authorization
- Logging
With effective application security integration, businesses can simplify protecting their application code and data.
#3. Edge Security
There is a growing movement towards edge computing and away from solely relying on centralized infrastructure. Many applications in IoT struggle with the hard-capped latency that comes with transferring data over long distances. This means edge security and ensuring protection across the entire network, all the way from the core to the extremities, will become vital for many businesses.
Whether it is local datacentres, micro datacentres, or small IoT devices that shift compute power to the end-user, businesses need a plan for integrating edge security into their overall cybersecurity efforts for complete visibility.
Improving Security via Integration and Automation
Security integration offers cross-customer threat intelligence for faster vulnerability detection and cyberattack response. With security tools that are fully integrated with one another, you give yourself maximum visibility and coverage to see the threats posed and decide how best to deal with them.
For modern cybersecurity to be successful, it also requires automation. Cyberattacks themselves have become heavily automated, and you cannot keep up with these threats through manual decision-making alone. Instead, you have to fight fire with fire and incorporate automatic responses that eliminate the need to wait for human interaction.
Automation offers a range of benefits to improve security, including:
- Data Management: Correlating information gathered by different protections to generate future steps based on all available data.
- Finding Existing Infections: Once inside, the clock is ticking to identify threats before a full data breach occurs. Automating the process offers the best chance of quickly identifying threats already in your network.
- Fast Protections: After identifying a threat, automation allows protections to be applied faster than the infection can spread.
Integrate and Automate to Survive
The online world can feel like a scary place to operate. But it isn’t changing anytime soon, and the only way to survive is to develop a security strategy fit for purpose. This means integration and automation.
With a single platform overseeing a comprehensive suite of tools all designed to work together, you gain complete visibility of your business’s security. This leads to compounding benefits with greater context for future decisions. Combine this with automation that can adapt to emerging threats in real-time, and you’ve got a good chance of keeping the bad guys out and the good times rolling.
