Advance and simplify to amplify your cyber operations

New and worsening challenges for CyberOps

Modern enterprises must embrace cloud transformation if they want to capture new opportunities and stay competitive. But the rapid pace of cloud adoption has introduced a number of new challenges for businesses. Threat detection and response are becoming increasingly complex, putting pressure on many organizations’ cybersecurity operations.

Further complicating things is a new generation of advanced cyber threats, which make threat hunting more challenging, and the proliferation of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and third-party applications, which introduce a great deal of risk for organizations.

Security, orchestration and automation tools can help organizations secure and streamline their cybersecurity operations, but they can also add complexities and costliness. Too many tools, tools that don’t work together or tools that are too complicated can create overwhelming amounts of alerts, which can lead to doubts about alert fidelity, alert fatigue and analyst burnout.

To maintain and build digital trust, organizations must put security at the forefront of their cloud transformation journey. Security transformations should take place in tandem with digital transformations, including cloud transformations, if they’re to be successful.

Modern security operations need simple(r) and more effective cyber solutions

A traditional approach to security operations (SecOps) is no longer enough to meet the ever-changing business demands in today’s connected world. Legacy and on-premises security incident and event management solutions can’t keep pace with the rate of security events, and they aren’t scalable. 

Simpler cybersecurity capabilities can help amplify the effectiveness of your operations. But streamlining your operations with rapid time to value may feel like a bold move. Simplifying, minimizing and combining your technology stack will involve asking some hard questions. Perhaps that’s why 20% of Canadian companies report having yet to realize substantial value from their cloud investments.

Help your business transform to meet cybersecurity complexity head-on

Business transformation isn’t a journey with a single destination—it’s an iterative process. Cyber operations (CyberOps) modernization can create new opportunities for businesses, but it can also create new risks. Organizations must respond quickly and efficiently to those challenges if they want to navigate the current risk and regulatory landscape with more certainty. 

Streamlining your cybersecurity operations can help your organization reduce the complexities and costs associated with cloud-first adoption. A more intelligent system can help your organization take care of the alert and threat life cycle from end to end.

• Get more value from the large amounts of cybersecurity data you’re ingesting by integrating tools and technologies and eliminating redundancies. 
• Bring together contextual threat intelligence from inside and outside your organization to centrally monitor risks and assign the right course of action. 
• Simplify cyber threat modelling and log source ingestion in your cloud environment, reduce alert volume and increase alert fidelity with automation by design. 
• Realize objectives around your cyber risk profile quickly and more efficiently with continuous improvement for your detection and response capabilities.

Modernizing CyberOps for better threat detection and response

Before you begin modernizing your organization’s SecOps, start thinking about the outcomes you want to achieve. Clearly articulating what it is that you want to enable can help your organization keep those goals in sight when new obstacles arise.

Start by identifying what it is that you’re trying to protect, your key business objectives and the principles for threat management you want to implement. Next, determine whether your existing capabilities can support those objectives, from your current technology landscape to your workforce. Then think about how you can accelerate transformation and create a roadmap to guide you through the process. 

We often see clients focusing a lot of time on the threat landscape as they embark on cloud transformation. But understanding assets, past vulnerability assessments and threat intelligence is equally important. We’ve noticed powerful outcomes when organizations take a more comprehensive, end-to-end approach:

1. Organize your approach around what types of assets exist in the organization to understand the threat landscape using actionable threat intelligence.
2. Collect organization-specific data that can provide intelligent information to threat modelling professionals on your SecOps team.
3. Combine red and blue teaming exercises for a “purple teaming” approach to tune use cases, understand control effectiveness and see overall coverage tied to risk outcomes. 
4. Catalogue and prioritize use cases in an iterative way, considering contextual data and external and internal intelligence for a more panoramic view. 
5. Make note of any lessons learned as you assign the severity of use cases. It’s also important to assign the right course of action in case your use cases trigger a false positive. 
6. Deploy further content using powerful automation logic apps. 
   
7. Bring it all together in an automated threat handbook that describes how an analyst can perform these functions to remediate threats from end to end.

These steps can help simplify your organization’s cybersecurity operations with the power of automation to detect and respond to threats faster and with more confidence.