The increasing quantity of technology required to run an enterprise business or organisation means that the attack surface presented to the outside world is growing.
With every new cloud service or application, every operating system update on a mobile phone, there are more opportunities that hackers will exploit to compromise the individual user, and/or the business’s property. That complicated situation has been exacerbated recently by the massive increase (involuntarily imposed) in remote working.
There are nearly as many different cybersecurity tools as there are threats out there, with each tool working in different ways to help protect individuals, their devices, the networks that connect them, and the local or online services and applications that power the business.
Nearly half of organisations (44 percent) see more than 10,000 separate alerts every day, of which around half elicit a response from a member of a security team, or a protective device or application. Security teams talk openly about being overwhelmed by multiple red flags and have to prioritise every alert to concentrate on mission-critical systems and the most essential personnel.
IT departments may have sufficient budget for cybersecurity staff (although many don’t), but despite the offers of good money on the table for prospective candidates, referencing findings by Cybersecurity Ventures, a Cisco whitepaper titled Cohesive Security states that by 2024 there will be around 3.5 million cybersecurity roles unfilled, worldwide.
Adding fuel to the fire, a CISO Benchmark Report, also from Cisco, states that 74 percent of cybersecurity professionals believe that protecting the enterprise is more difficult today because of an “expanding attack surface.”
That’s particularly pertinent at the present moment in time, with the majority of employees working remotely and therefore increasing the potential numbers of attack possibilities significantly. With already-stretched resources, and not enough staff to protect the organisation sufficiently, there is no simple answer or silver bullet for CISOs.
But what the Cisco Cohesive Security whitepaper shows is that by drawing together the various tools that cover off the different aspects of the enterprise’s security activities, security teams can transform their roles from preventing or blocking certain behaviours to those of enabling the business to work securely.
Different geographies need different mixes of tools (the UK is behind its European partners in use of MFA [multifactor authentication], for example), so a solution that offers a mixture of cybersecurity methods is important. But each should be integrated to the others, too.
As any leader knows, forming coherent teams of individuals that work together is the most effective way of creating strength. Cisco’s SecureX solution is a way that the individual tools of the cybersecurity function can work together, making a much more robust, more cohesive security platform from which to work.
From that platform, cybersecurity can begin to enable work practices like experiments in remote working, new deployments of IoT, safer cloud applications, and leaner, more focused data centre operations.
By enabling the different cybersecurity solutions, at work right across the enterprise, to listen and respond to one another, protection becomes cohesive and better coordinated.
We’re incredibly proud to unleash SecureX on the security market and we’re continuing to innovate in the products that underline SecureX being the broadest most integrated platform. Read more about it in our latest #SecureX Blog: https://t.co/ta9fBQkLqS pic.twitter.com/QdupdPbELV
— Cisco Secure (@CiscoSecure) June 20, 2020
To be released at the end of June, and offered for free for all Cisco customers, the SecureX platform is typical of all good ideas: simple in practice yet highly capable. It unifies all existing security devices and platforms, presenting a place where security teams get full oversight into every aspect of the organisation’s security stance.
It integrates with third-party tooling, so preserves existing security investments, yet was designed for the new reality — more remote working, for sure, but also the reality that is tighter budgets, fewer qualified people, and less total resource.
Read about Cisco’s vision for a new approach to integrated security, and get a head start on the new SecureX offering.
