Siloed security programs are not delivering the right level of risk view

2020 witnessed the threat landscape in India changing and evolving quickly, data breaches, ransomware attacks, privacy failures, and other cybersecurity challenges are now on everyone’s radar screen more than ever. Yet most of the businesses are still struggling with effectively preparing for them. The challenges that continue to hold companies back include – complex regulatory requirements, lack of alignment on security strategy as well as cybersecurity and compliance maturity, frequent organizational changes, security skills shortages, uncertainty regarding security “best practices” and lastly insufficient practice of plans for responding to a cybersecurity incident — that is if they have an incident response plan at all.

A recent study from IBM and Ponemon Institute highlighted that 41% of the respondents from India review and test their cybersecurity incident response plan only once each year. This is an alarming fact, specifically in the light of the current pandemic since many organizations had to shift overnight to a Hybrid work environment leading to many unforeseen risks. Indian companies witnessed an average of ₹140 million total cost of a data breach in 2020 an increase of 9.4% from 2019. Additionally, companies with fully deployed security automation were able to detect and contain a breach 27% faster than those with none.

forward, the next wave of the tech security landscape will be enhanced by the new tech trends helping organizations innovate and be prepared for all present and future uncertainties.

Most large organizations that already have significant security deployment would be looking to drive modernization and transformation of their tools to better cover the increased threat landscape. Organizations are optimizing and scaling their existing tools both in terms of newer use cases and newer detection scenarios being operationalized. All of these are leading to more coverage of their infrastructure across on-Prem, operational technology (OT) infrastructure as well as cloud infrastructure and services. Further, along with upscaling the tool's output organizations would also look to modernize the security insight exchange between these controls in a platform-based manner rather than the existing manual methods of information and security context sharing.

With this the companies are realizing that all the siloed security programs are not delivering the right level of risk view to them and it is necessary to drive horizontal data analysis across "all" the security telemetry data that is available for the most critical resources in the organization i.e. people, data and infrastructure. This leads to the heavy use of AI/ML within the realm of security and moving forward, organizations will embrace the power of machine learning to help them monitor their risks across all security controls. There are mountains of security telemetry data available with all IT landscapes and not all of this data is being analyzed and used for security monitoring and threat hunting. Experts expect that, the automation and orchestration to be the core of security strategy, which could help to ensure that the detected incidents are addressed in a systematic and compliant manner.

Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, Chief editor, VARINDIA