By: Anshul Garg, Gedy Tovar.
Security teams have typically purchased point products to solve specific problems. With each new tool, the amount of security data they need to investigate increases. Then, with data spread across multiple tools, trying to understand their risk becomes a challenge.
As businesses move workloads to the cloud, data becomes fragmented across on-premises and multiple cloud ecosystems. All this results in security complexity becoming the top challenge for organizations.
Security roles and tools are unique but need to work together
Traditionally, the challenges and needs of each role within the security team have been so different that organizations gravitated towards using separate solutions for each security challenge. Findings in a recent study show that the organizations surveyed estimated their organization was using more than 45 different security tools on average, and that each incident they responded to required coordination across 19 tools on average. This coordination across tools and roles within the security team, results in time lost as teams have to manually stitch together their findings, due to the complex state of their security architecture.
Security leaders want to understand their enterprise risk. They lack integrated security solutions, adding to the complexity of their security program. Their pain points range from managing the growing complexity facing the security landscape to the skills gap and decreasing security return on investment.
Security analysts are responsible for monitoring IT activity, detecting and investigating suspicious behaviors, and ensuring the company’s assets are protected. They lose time trying to work around the complexity of their current security program and manually investigating indicators of compromise spread across multiple tools and teams. Their pain points include gathering threat intelligence across disparate products.
For incident responders, the complexity of today’s security environment consumes critical time. They spend time working through large volumes of data, coordinating across teams, and manually tracking activity and evidence in order to identify the root cause of security incidents and initiate the correct response playbook. Their pain points range from collaborating with diverse teams to incident correlation across disparate systems.
A security platform brings teams and tools together
With the number of tools that security teams use today, they often have to spend much of their time integrating tools, learning different products, and switching between screens. However, with a security platform, teams and tools should ideally come together. Security leaders, security analysts, and incident responders can work together off of a single platform – which has already taken care of integrating the tools unique to each role. With a security platform that can better connect workflows, teams will be able to decrease their response time. Instead of losing time switching between multiple screens and products, security teams can get the information they are looking for, all in one place. Teams only need to learn one interface for orchestrating different actions, making it easier to drive security into lines of business and reduce integration costs.
Amongst high-performing organizations in a recent report, 63% said the use of interoperable tools helped them improve their response to cyberattacks. Implementing a security platform is a way to bypass the complexity of today’s security architecture, by providing the user with a single console to work from and to work with other team members. Teams are then able to focus on their work while the platform takes care of managing integrations internally.
Time to modernize security and reduce complexity
It’s time to modernize security with an open, multicloud platform. This security platform helps teams uncover hidden threats, make more informed risk-based decisions, and prioritize the team’s time. With this modernized approach, security teams come together— collaborating with one another by working through a unified interface across their unique tools, which simplifies their daily work. For example, when a security analyst finds an Indicator of Compromise (IoC), they can create a case, and add all necessary details. The incident responder can investigate the case and run federated searches. All this is done on a single console, eliminating the need to work through dozens of tools and reduce complexity.
If you’re struggling with the complexity of your security program, see how a security platform, like Cloud Pak for Security, can help you simplify your work—as a security leader, a security analyst, or an incident responder.
Experience how different your workday could be through this interactive product experience: ibm.biz/CP4Sdemo