From SecOps to SecOptimal

Transform your program and your business

The future of SecOps

Traditional Security Operations (SecOps) programs require a more agile approach to harnessing data and keeping up with emerging security threats. These programs have been challenged to handle a wide array of data sources, creating an even murkier picture of the threats they should prioritize.

Your SecOps professionals should consider transforming their programs from SecOps to SecOptimal. Host everything — technologies, processes, dashboards, automation — on a single, unified platform.

The upside: everything works together easily and effectively, delivering better security and automation to save time and money. Given it’s platform-based, there’ll be no need to transform again. You can just switch out features, instead — creating more savings for your enterprise.

This type of movement requires nimble coordination between C-suite stakeholders — not just the CISO. There’s a real opportunity to improve program efficiency, free up resources and enhance security to deliver greater value to customers and investors, if the C-suite is all aligned and engaged.

The challenge at hand for your SIEM

Your security information and event manager (SIEM) wasn’t designed for a smaller and more contained digital universe. And you may have invested good money on security applications to handle myriad tasks that defense-in-depth requires. But if these technologies don’t communicate with one another, they can’t work together. Your SIEM should operate with information from your security stack.

Likewise, if the SIEM doesn’t operate in tandem with security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) due to lackluster integrations, your teams should correlate the information and coordinate responses manually. This can be time-consuming, tedious and largely ineffective, leading to a drain on time and potential budget constraints.

SecOptimal: Better security, savings and value

A SecOptimal program offers coordination, orchestration and collaboration for enterprise-wide security. Your program can become:

Questions for the C-Suite to consider

Here is an overview of the key questions each respective group across leadership will want to focus on as they get a better understanding of SecOps platform transformation.

Chief Information Security Officer

1. Do I have the right people to make this project succeed?

CISOs often lack the resources needed to do security the right way. Their staff get tied up with today’s priority tasks while more strategic operations go unresolved, and budgets don’t keep pace with the needs.

Instead of economies of scale, it’s time to shift your mindset to one of “economies of learning,” to apply brain power instead of ever-increasing person power. Rather than searching endlessly for security issues that you already know exist — an approach that can leave your teams blindsided when new problems occur — why not use a connected SecOps platform with AI to predict events, share information with other teams, and resolve threats in advance?

2. Are we using the appropriate level of automation?

Automating high-volume, low-risk tasks can free your security staff to focus on big problems. This is the collaboration of the future: AI analyzing mass quantities of data in the blink of a virtual eye, providing your team with recommendations on how to write detection logic to alert against emerging threats, and responding to identified threats in an efficient manner.

3. Can I justify the expense?

CISOs face increasing pressure to hold the line on costs and do more with less. But not exploring how to automate more of your processes will only increase the risks — and costs — to your organization as bad actors use every route possible to find ways into your systems. Using AI and other automation solutions can help you do more — analyze data, detect threats, respond to security events — with your existing funds.

Chief Information Officer/Chief Technology Officer

1. How can a SecOps transformation help our security teams innovate ways to better protect the organization from cyberattacks?

By leveraging platforms that help to reduce the mundane tasks your talented security staff is focused on, allowing for more creativity to think ahead of where/how the next threat may emerge.

2. How can this help us work faster and bring new products to the marketplace more rapidly and competitively?

Using an advanced platform that can scale and has an ease of ingesting information from a variety of sources can allow your organization to feel more confident that security can keep up with the pace of your changing environment.

3. Is this platform the one that works best for your company and technologies?

Leveraging a centralized platform that integrates well with your business analytics strategy may enable the broader business to gain insights that they may not have had access to in the past.

Chief Risk Officer

1. How can this help us see enterprise risks all together and work together as an organization to manage them?

A SecOps platform that incorporates threat hunting could help identify new risks to your organization by coordinating and communicating with your technologies and using AI to seek out threats. It might also help you make more effective enterprise risk management decisions.

2. How will this inform and improve my risk reporting?

Having access to more data can give you the documentation you need to make the case for risk response actions to the C-suite and board. AI features might help you quantify those risks so you can better prioritize them and enlist the support of the CEO, CFO and board in your initiatives to manage them.

3. Does our company’s existing level of risk support another technology transformation?

Adding AI to your business processes will certainly require sweeping change throughout the enterprise. And as new technologies, processes and business models take hold, new transformations will certainly follow. Not keeping pace with threat actors that will unabashedly use emerging technology presents its own set of risks. You should have flexibility to manage the overall risks amid rapid change.

Chief Executive Officer

1. How can I put in place security technologies that aren’t only a fix for now but scalable for the future?

The task of pivoting to new security technologies and advances is a constant priority, especially to keep up with technology innovation. Incorporating new technologies and capabilities becomes much easier when it’s a matter of merely switching out a feature or installing a software update.

2. Are we all working on this transformation together?

Leadership should work together to prevent and respond to attacks as a collective front.

Having a single platform is an effective way to achieve the “big-picture view” you need — as well as for others to be able to use data for their discrete needs. Everyone can work together more easily and effectively toward the same goal: reducing risk.

3. How will I enlist the board’s support for this change?

SecOps transformation on the heels of, or concurrent with, overall digital transformation may risk “transformation fatigue” on your board’s part. The CISO may be the one making the pitch to them but you may need to show your support.

Aspects you might address include the cost-efficiency of moving to a modern, unified platform, the ability to make better use of enterprise data by sharing access throughout the company, and the need for the C-suite and board to pull together for success.

Board of Directors

1. How can this improve security? Can it improve network visibility?

New regulations regarding disclosure of certain cybersecurity events puts more onus on board members to be cyber-savvy. Understanding how a SecOps transformation can affect the organization’s security overall can help the board better govern the change.

2. How can the ability to share enterprise data affect data security? Can we satisfy regulators that it won’t violate data privacy laws?

Data privacy and security have become overriding themes as regulators worldwide step up their demands on organizations to gain consent from data owners to use their information, and to know exactly where that data goes from the moment it’s collected. A unified platform can make tracking that data much easier.

3. How will this help the company achieve its objectives?

With costs leading the conversation in this environment, using AI to automate low-level tasks that are time sinks and leveraging generated suggestions from AI-enhanced security platforms may offer tangible ROI on some of the transformation costs.

Bringing together technologies with a unified platform

The Google Cybersecurity Alliance — PwC and Google Cloud — work in tandem to help propel our clients’ SecOps programs into the future. We’ve helped clients double their visibility using Google Security Operations — a modern, cloud-native SecOps platform that empowers teams to better defend against today’s and tomorrow’s threats.

Using AI-enabled automation and analytics, Google Cloud storage capacity, Mandiant Threat Intelligence, and PwC’s knowledge and experience in the cyber realm, our clients are achieving growth at an affordable, predictable cost.

And PwC configuration and support can help confirm that your new SecOps platform works exactly as you need.

Contact us to learn more about how PwC and Google can help take you to SecOptimal with Google Security Operations, one of the most advanced security operations platforms on the market.

Contact us

Matthew Wilden

Principal, Google Cybersecurity Alliance Leader, PwC US

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