By Motti Elloul, VP Customer Success and Incident Response, Perception Point
Enterprise security teams are spending astonishing amounts of time and money remediating cybersecurity incidents. A successful email-based cyber-attack can take security staff an average of 86 hours to address, which can cost $6,452 per incident in time alone.
Considering the current economic climate, and with the impact of phishing and other serious cyberthreats forecast to intensify, the price for effective cyber-protection is staggeringly high.
As cybersecurity threats escalate, it is imperative for both enterprises and SMBs to invest in robust security solutions that not only address security vulnerabilities but also support overburdened security teams. One hack or ransomware attack has the potential to seriously damage an SMB and significantly disrupt the productivity of an enterprise.
This article will highlight how security teams can best secure their organizations in the most cost-effective way so that no company, big or small, will have to suffer such severe consequences.
Using a Managed Service
The growing number of SaaS/cloud-based collaboration tools associated with the modern workplace has also increased the number of threat vectors and areas of vulnerability. As a result, maintaining a holistic view of a system’s vulnerabilities can take a significant portion of security teams’ time. This is time that security teams, often overwhelmed and understaffed, simply don’t have, leaving critical areas exposed.
Accordingly, security teams should be investing in solutions that include the support of a managed incident response service. Managed services can provide in-depth reporting and consistent coverage across all threat vectors, allowing for ongoing optimization of organizations’ systems and deep-level analysis of key incidents and trends.
This not only provides some breathing room for cybersecurity teams, but it allows them to get ahead of threat actors, to stop wasting time putting out fires, and to start building effective preventative cybersecurity measures.
Cloud-Native Service
Many business processes are migrating to the cloud and security teams need to be taking advantage of tools that are built specifically to be used with these systems. Plenty of legacy solutions have shifted to be cloud-compatible, but they cannot compete with cloud-native solutions that have been built to operate specifically within the cloud environment. Cloud-based software can be seamlessly updated, vulnerabilities can be addressed, and patches can be uploaded virtually as needed. IT teams should not always need to be physically present to deal with potential issues, nor do they need to pay for the ongoing costs of server hardware, power consumption, and space. Outsourcing these to third parties can provide significant savings for any security team.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Advanced AI and ML technology allow for the rapid scanning of text, files, and URLs with multiple advanced detection engines, resulting in detection rates that human operators cannot possibly match. AI and ML-based solutions can leverage image recognition, optical character recognition, anomaly detection, natural language processing, and other advanced algorithms to identify impersonation techniques, phishing sites, attacks, and even spam that could bypass the most seasoned security team analyst, let alone an average office worker. These advances offer significant support to enterprise security teams, especially because the more data AI-based solutions amass and process, the better prepared they become to identify patterns and detect more potential attacks.
Even if offices provide their staff with the best cybersecurity education, the growing sophistication of threat actors means that spoofed emails and cloned websites are nearly indistinguishable from the real ones. Employing automated solutions that are more discerning than their human counterparts will save security teams time, resources, and budget.
Advances in AI and Ml-based technology have yielded cybersecurity tools that can support enterprise security teams and conserve team resources by reducing their manual workload. However, at this current point in time, AI tools still require some human support to operate the most effectively. Combining human expertise with the potential of AI and ML will prove the most cost-effective for organizations in the long run.
Consolidation
Wherever possible, enterprise security teams should be utilizing tools that can consolidate their security stack, saving time and money, as well as protecting organizations from the vulnerabilities caused by overstretched staff.
Although the cybersecurity industry is heading towards consolidation with the rise of increasingly effective XDRs, the XDR market is not quite advanced enough to provide total coverage. Therefore, CSOs looking at the bigger picture should be seeking niche tools that have synchronized with other solutions to create a more expansive web of coverage that can be easily monitored from one or more platforms.
This way, security teams will be able to view the connections between seemingly unrelated problems holistically and remediate malicious activity more easily. The built-in compatibility between different solutions will reduce a security team’s manual workload, and analysts can utilize their time to build more effective defenses and deal with cyberthreats more efficiently.
Don’t Panic. Strategize.
If enterprises don’t cover their bases, they could easily lose millions to theft, ransomware, or obstacles to business productivity. But it doesn’t have to cost organizations millions to protect themselves in the first place.
Enterprises can’t afford to wait for threats to emerge, only addressing new issues once they appear. Instead, they must pivot their approach and adopt preventative measures. Rather than identifying pain points and then introducing yet another system that staff members need to learn and monitor – compromising productivity levels for security teams and ordinary employees in the process – enterprises need to give their teams the opportunity to take a step back and strategically select cost-effective cybersecurity solutions that will create a cohesive line of defense for the organization.
This approach will help companies find ways to unburden their security teams while maintaining protection over their most precious assets without disrupting business processes.
