The constantly changing threat landscape is fueling an arms race between cyber guardians and cyber criminals. As cyberattack surfaces expand, and with new threats coming on the scene almost daily, how can you deliver customers the intelligence and visibility to know their cybersecurity solution can keep up?
It’s an important question, especially as more enterprises adopt emerging mobile, cloud and Internet-of-Things (IoT) initiatives. While they produce key business gains, these new initiatives also leave enterprises open to a variety of new security threats, including:
- Data breaches: Mobile and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiatives can end up with employees accessing and storing critical corporate data on unmanaged or personally owned devices, opening multiple avenues for attack.
- Shadow IT: When cloud applications are purchased by business units without IT’s knowledge or approval, critical data ends up stored across several cloud environments, all of them unmanaged and outside of IT’s control.
- Lack of network visibility: Few IoT devices were built with security in mind, and even fewer can be configured with anti-malware or other security applications, creating even more vulnerabilities across the corporate network.
More Tools Leads To Less Security
Faced with these new threats, many information security teams decide to take a defense-in-depth approach and layer on additional point security tools – each aimed at a different application type or new vulnerability – in the hopes of shoring up the gaps. In fact, Gartner predicts global spending on information security will grow to $81.6 billion by 2016, an increase of 7.9% over 2015.
Unfortunately, all these layered on tools lead to more complexity, which in turn, actually leads to less security. As teams rush to deploy and manage tools to prevent every possible attack, they end up being stretched too thin, inundated with competing alerts and ultimately missing key indicators of compromise.
Cyber Threat Assessment Helps Set Security Priorities
A better approach is to deploy cybersecurity strategically to optimize protection and efficiency – without putting a drain on resources. This means performing regular cyber threat assessments (CTAs) that help set the right priorities, and adapt security controls to best protect and mitigate against the threats that are most likely, costly and impactful. A good CTA:
- Helps customers prioritize information security threats, understand likely attack techniques and evaluate the capability of controls to prevent, detect and respond to an attack.
- Assesses each threat against the potential impact to the business, by assessing how systems and applications are used and determining their relative importance to the business as a whole.
Intelligence-Based Cybersecurity Optimizes Protection
Businesses already are buying into the advantages of intelligence-based cybersecurity and focusing a significant part of cybersecurity budgets on driving it. IDC finds the largest areas of growth in security spending are security analytics and threat intelligence (in addition to mobile and cloud security).
Our partner Fortinet offers complimentary CTAs to help your customers start from a position of knowledge. In addition, its FortiAnalyzer enables them to take that knowledge and hone it over time by quickly correlating network events, drilling down into suspicious activities and providing clear, end-to-end visibility across the entire network.
As a value-added distributor of Fortinet cybersecurity products, Fine Tec can help you ensure your customers are prioritizing security based on intelligence. Learn more.