Security - It's time to cook not just garnish!

Gone are the days when security was just a garnish atop the digital strategy of an organisation. Especially, during the pandemic it has become ever more pressing with adoption of virtual work environment, increased automation, remote troubleshooting and faster growth of connected devices. These trends have made the attack surface exponential larger and even more challenging to manage with lean-IT teams.

According to Accenture 68% of business leaders feel their cybersecurity risks are increasing. And these risks become even more real when hackers are attacking organisations every 39 seconds on an average of 2,244 times a day according to a study by University of Maryland.

This only gets worse with the fact that an average breach costs about $3.92 Million as per 2019 Cost of a Data Breach Report by IBM Security Intelligence.

Organisations have to think afresh and put security at the core of their digital strategy as it cuts across all the aspects of the transformations. Having said that, it’s not easy to implement and maintain a secure environment with every expanding and complex network. 

The three major challenge organisations are facing today, to secure their environment:

1.    The security effectiveness gap: Rising complexity with increasing capabilities

2.    Time consuming management and troubleshooting

3.    Difficult to scale security

 The security effectiveness gap

When businesses increase capabilities in order to improve the security on the widespread network, it also increasing the complexity exponentially as you can see in the image below.

It creates a huge gap in the effectiveness of the solutions implemented. This leads to an increase in Opex, consumes a huge amount of time and reduces efficiency of the IT team and the network itself.  

Time consuming management and troubleshooting

Many organisations face a challenge in terms of managing and troubleshooting problems in a complex security infrastructure. Many a times it’s due to implementation of multi-vendor solutions which lack interoperability or having a lack of single pane of glass to manage the entire security infrastructure. This leads to managing multiple dashboards and the IT team ends up spending over half their time in just maintaining and managing rather than focusing on the future strategy.

According to IBM it takes 209 days at an average to identify a breach in the network. This happens as almost 90% of the traffic is encrypted and the hackers are developing day zero (unknown) threats which take the network by surprise. Owing to this, the average lifecycle of a breach goes up to 314 days as organisations lack tools to track and remediate the threats in near real time. This leads to the huge cost of breaches and hence effective and quick troubleshooting is of key importance.

Difficult to scale security

Scalability is not something which kept the CSIOs/IT directors up at night only after Covid-19. It has always been there but the pandemic escalated this concern when organisations had to implement secure scalable solutions overnight to ensure business continuity.

How can Cisco help?

Let me start by posing a question to you; How would you like to manage, troubleshoot and increase visibility into your entire security infrastructure through a single pane of glass?

Reducing security effectiveness gap

With Cisco SecureX, you can easily address a wide range of use cases, including SecOps, NetOps, and ITOps, using technologies from both Cisco and third parties. This results in a more cohesive and collaborative approach to security. Cisco SecureX makes security a more holistic and natural extension of your environments, removing barriers, accelerating response, and streamlining operations.

SecureX is a single point of management reducing complexity even as you add more and more capabilities to your network.

Reducing time to manage and troubleshoot

Cisco's strategy to simplify management and troubleshooting across your architecture is by expanding your visibility through out your attack surface, reduce and prioritise from the large number of threats you receive in you network to simplify troubleshooting and lastly accelerate the response and remediation process from 314 day to the matter of minutes and hours.

And yes, all of that from a single dashboard so your team spends less time on maintenance and more on creating new solutions for your customers.

Remediating and troubleshooting unknown threats has been a major concern as the hackers are developing new ways to exploit the network. But Cisco solutions are also powered by Cisco Talos. It is the worlds largest non-government threat intelligence organisation. Talos feeds realtime information about the latest threats to all the solutions so the risk to the unknown threats can be significantly reduced.

Easy to scale security

Last but not the least, scalability. Cisco security solutions cover a wide range of security issues, that means organisations don't have to bring a new solution for every issue they have. Along with that new updates make each solutions more capable of handling issues and cover a broader range of security considerations.

Seamless integration of all the solutions together and to be able to access from a single dashboard makes it extremely easy for the IT team to scale existing security infrastructure.

Conclusion

Overcoming the challenges discussed in this article in a short period (owing to the pandemic) of time can be a major concern for the organisations. Hence, It is time for the organisations to view security as a core component of their strategy and as an ecosystem that encapsulates the entire digital infrastructure.

And over the years Cisco has learned from its customers to keep all the ingredients ready and simple for them to cook the best meal possible which results in the most palatable experience.