Today, cybersecurity remains a high priority for organisations as many implement the "prepare and protect" strategy. However, a 451 Research report commissioned by Panaseer indicates that achieving this ideal is not always possible.
"Prepare and Protect" or "Monitor and Respond"?
Although "maintaining tight control over the environment to limit the potential for abuse, close vulnerabilities and ward off threats is effective", achieving this ideal is often frustrating. As a result, many organisations now acknowledge that a "number of attacks will likely ."
This has often led security teams to prioritise a "monitor and respond" approach when attackers overcome defence systems. However, "monitor and respond" is frequently at the expense of "prepare and protect."
In regards to security performance and the associated costs, this strategy is particularly poor. As the report observes, "preparedness before an incident is significantly less costly than incident recovery."
While organisations understand the security and cost benefits of "prepare and protect", there are certain obstacles that hinder the performance of this method. For example, a "profusion of tools and data" complicates and frustrates an effective strategy.
Over-reliance on people to solve security issues is also a major barrier as it represents an unsustainable business model. A "one size fits all" mentality is also problematic as it leads to tools and processes that are "insufficiently flexible" when it comes to serving people and processes.
Finally, "lopsided investments in reactive measures" often materialise as a result of these failures. Nevertheless, enterprises now have access to new technology that can better equip them when implementing a "prepare and protect" strategy.
The value of proactive security
In order to overcome the aforementioned obstacles, organisations need to "embrace new approaches" and implement proactive security. Nonetheless, many companies continue to struggle with "proactive preparedness."
According to the report, "advances in data gathering, rationalisation, analytics and automation" means that proactive strategy is more actionable than ever. As a result, companies can now effectively gather and analyse data from multiple and varied sources.
Proactive security platforms focused "prepare and protect" also enable security efforts to streamline processes. In addition to this, enterprises are able to "better utilise people and their expertise."
By freeing up valuable human resources, automation allows people to focus on solving problems that machines cannot tackle. By the same score, automation "goes beyond simply relieving the burden on humans; data-driven automation performs many security tasks better than experienced people."
The need for "prepare and protect" will become far more urgent, the report predicts. As a result, "the time to take action is now" with proactive security before organisations become even more "overwhelmed with what threats they may face tomorrow."
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