Robust security is a blend of tools and best practice approaches designed to optimise observability and improve response times across IT infrastructure and applications, writes Marchant Laauwen, chief technologist at DR Insight.
Security-focused observability gives the business a holistic view of its entire security estate and overall security posture. It takes security beyond the limitations of threat detection and incident response, providing real-time visibility into every endpoint, attack surface, database, and connection within the company.
As a living security entity, this approach allows security teams to gain deeper insight into risks, incidents, events, and attacks using a shared language across teams and systems.
Gartner defines it as products that ‘ingest telemetry’ (operational data from various sources) to better understand performance, health, application behaviour, services, and infrastructure.
Observability within security aims to ensure your threat responses are faster, your incident responses are more effective, and that your business is resilient enough to manage an increasingly challenging landscape.
According to the Splunk State of Security 2024 report, companies with an advanced security posture outperform those without in key areas such as resourcing, resilience, innovation, and detection and response times.
Companies that have invested in intelligent security detect incidents significantly faster – 21 days compared with 34.
- 52% of companies have experienced a data breach;
- 49% of businesses experienced an email compromise;
- 49% a system compromise; and
- 48% cyber-extortion over the past year.
Those extra days can make all the difference.
As your company dives deeper into digital and cloud, you face multiple threats and challenges from different directions. What are your vulnerabilities? Where are the gaps?
You want transparency and visibility into your security architecture, so you are not overwhelmed by the threats. This level of visibility is significant for companies balancing security demands across both on-prem and the cloud.
Best practice means deftly juggling multiple threads within a cohesive architecture designed to meet your unique needs and should include:
- A centralised dashboard populated by tools designed to aggregate security-relevant data from multiple sources across cloud and on-premises infrastructure. This data includes logs, network traffic, user activities, and application performance metrics. It is unified in a centralised space that provides a single pane of glass for monitoring and detection. This ensures teams can correlate events and detect threats at speed.
- Consistent security policies to ensure consistent standards throughout the business, regardless of where assets are located.
- Cloud-native integration that leverages APIs and native monitoring tools to provide deep visibility into cloud resources. This lifts the ‘fog of war’ that often prevents security teams from effectively managing cloud environments and increases the risk of unexpected vulnerabilities.
- Identity and access management (IAM) tracking is designed to monitor user activities and access patterns, quickly identifying unusual or unauthorised access across hybrid environments.
- Endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools and user and entity behaviour analytics (UEBA) significantly improve the ability to identify anomalous activities and potential threats.
- Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platforms can help automate routine tasks and accelerate response times.
- Network traffic analysis rapidly identifies potential data exfiltration or malicious lateral movement, thanks to visibility throughout the network and communication across on-premises and cloud resources.
- Cloud-based analytics platforms can process large volumes of security data from across all environments to enable real-time analysis and threat detection at scale. This level of scalable data processing ensures comprehensive visibility and an integrated incident response.
- A resilient security posture capable of adapting to future challenges with a company that has a proven record and can help you evolve your security in a way that is both cost-effective and meaningful.
Combining these tools and approaches delivers enhanced security monitoring that’s proactive and realistic.
Why realistic? Because humans can’t sift through the vast quantities of data generated by systems and security tools alone – when the data is combined with observability and intelligent security tools, it moves from overwhelming to in-depth insights. Implementing a solid security information and event management (SIEM) system capable of centralising visibility, delivering real-time threat detection, and correlating data from various sources significantly improves security posture and visibility.
Security-focused observability also doesn’t have to be complicated. It is a layered approach that uses advanced technologies, processes, and approaches but can be simplified in the right hands and with the right tools.
The key lies in achieving comprehensive visibility across both on-premises and cloud environments, leveraging automation and artificial intelligence to process vast amounts of security data, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement and adaptation.