How Can You Improve Your Security Posture with Cyber Fusion?

Cyber Fusion

Posted on: June 13, 2022

What does an organization do when an incident occurs? What happens when a threat is detected? If an organization doesn’t have strategies in place to respond to such incidents, then its security posture needs a great deal of improvement.

What is Security Posture?

A robust security posture means an organization has the required processes in place to protect its business and applications from threats and vulnerabilities. Today when critical data is constantly at risk of being exposed by bad actors, fortifying security posture needs to be a top priority for SecOps teams.

Security posture is determined by an organization’s ability to protect its networks, data, and systems, and how it reacts when an attack takes place. Simply put, security posture is a barometer for how cybersecurity is practiced throughout an organization and how resilient an organization is to cyberattacks.

The strength of an organization’s security posture is inversely proportional to the amount of risk it faces. Organizations must improve their security posture so that they can focus on threat visibility and cyber risk quantification. A dynamic security posture with the ability to calibrate and scale SecOps as per the changing threat landscape is what organizations need right now.

Why Do You Need to Assess Your Security Posture?

Assessing the security posture starts with identifying what’s wrong so that steps can be taken to mend it. All tools and technologies at an organization’s disposal should be audited to determine their capabilities to defend against sophisticated threats.

Some of the questions that security teams need to ponder upon include:

Is there a deeper understanding of the threats and vulnerabilities across the IT ecosystem and each specific area of security?
Is there a clear view of all systems and applications?
Are there systems and processes to detect and mitigate cyberattacks?
Does the company have enough automated cybersecurity solutions in place?
Are security teams collaborating internally?
Is there complete threat visibility across the environment?
Is the approach to incident response reactive or proactive?

If security teams have answers to all these questions, then they are on the right track of their cybersecurity maturity journey. For improving their security posture, organizations should consider building cyber fusion centers (CFCs) that bring all security functions under one roof in an integrated and collaborative environment.

How Cyber Fusion Improves Security Posture?

Leveraging cyber fusion to strengthen an organization’s security posture will ensure that security won’t be cast aside as an afterthought. Keeping cyber fusion on top of mind when focusing on security posture will give an added advantage in terms of defense against threats and breaches, whether the associated risk is large or small.

Break Down Silos

Cyber fusion solutions allow organizations to collaborate via real-time threat intelligence sharing and foster a collaboration-driven response to common threats. Such solutions are sector-agnostic and deliver closer cooperation between information sharing communities (ISACs/ISAOs), CERTs, private organizations, and government agencies. This empowers organizations to combine their strengths and display collective defense against advanced threat actors.

The ability to break down silos through cyber fusion allows SecOps teams to gain deeper threat visibility with information on different types of threats in a single place. Consequently, a cyber fusion-driven platform acts as a single source of truth for decision-makers within an organization, assisting them in tracking all the relevant metrics and creating a common goal for their security functions.

Operationalize Threat Intel

SecOps teams must leverage advanced threat intelligence platforms (TIPs) for adding context to raw and unstructured threat data collected from disparate sources. TIPs allow security teams to collect, organize, and manage threat data and turn it into contextualized, noise-free, and actionable threat intelligence.

TIPs help security teams ingest, enrich, correlate, act upon, and share threat information in real-time, improving their ability to identify and respond to threats faster, thereby boosting 360-degree threat visibility.

Modern-day TIPs allow threat intelligence operationalization with last-mile delivery both within an organization and with external peers, information-sharing communities, vendors, and other stakeholders. This helps develop collective defense, promote collaboration between teams, and boost every participating organization’s know-how about indicators of compromise (IOCs), adversaries, and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), and much more.

Automate Threat Response

A CFC allows SecOps teams to automate incident response processes into an end-to-end threat response. The modern-day threat response process does not only contain incidents but focuses on the proactive elimination of potential threats even before they impact an organization. It’s time organizations include more automation and orchestration into SecOps workflows and move toward next-gen SOC (NG-SOC) capabilities using CFCs.

The advanced threat response capabilities of a CFC help in managing the triage, investigation, and actioning of incidents within an automated response workflow while enabling seamless collaboration with all security stakeholders within an organization. The up-to-date threat response platforms are strengthened by security orchestration, automation, and threat intelligence that propel security operations in real-time. This grants security teams the ability to tackle threats before they become cybersecurity adversity.

Orchestrate Across Deployment Environments

Managing security tools deployed on cloud or on-premise environments is complicated for security teams. A CFC solution has the capabilities to orchestrate across multiple different environments including cloud and on-premise. It offers multi-environment orchestration to provide the scalability and flexibility needed to connect all the security processes across an organization. Once an action is triggered in a CFC solution, applications within a playbook synchronize in real-time to protect an organization’s global network assets. This capability allows security teams to manage and monitor all their environments from a single cyber fusion platform. Cross-environment orchestration allows playbooks to be customized to adapt to unique threats or environments. Thus, time-intensive processes are completed in seconds and all the actions are measured and recorded in a CFC platform for future reporting and reference.

Build Situational Awareness

Organizations must start thinking about sharing real-time threat alerts with their employees and security teams. It will help their security teams and employees learn about the threats facing them and also improve their day-to-day decision-making. They must leverage a modern-day threat alert sharing and aggregation platform that can help their security teams enhance their security capabilities with automated alert aggregation, strategic threat intelligence sharing, and mobile-enabled alerting. This will keep their security teams situationally aware of the continuously changing threat landscape.

Threat intelligence sharing helps in achieving situational awareness of threats and incidents 24x7 and builds an organization’s SecOps workflows for greater adaptability and scalability. Using a threat alert sharing platform, organizations can share real-time threat alerts with their SecOps teams based on their role, industry sector, and geography, thereby spreading situational awareness. This will help them gain better threat visibility and take proactive mitigative actions, amplifying their organizational decision-making in daily business operations.

Focus on Vulnerability Management

A CFC helps in ensuring that security teams stay updated on all current vulnerabilities and take proper risk mitigation measures. After being notified of a potential threat from a vulnerability management tool, it allows SOC teams to correlate the data with information gathered from other security tools, enabling them to immediately respond to vulnerabilities. The SOAR capabilities of a CFC queries the vulnerability management tool for further diagnosis and based on the insights, it can calculate the risk and priority level of the vulnerability.

Foster Security Collaboration

CFCs make security teams work in an environment where they can handle potential threats by bridging the gap between multiple teams in their organization. They foster security collaboration, greater visibility across all the security functions, and an advanced level of resilience and control. Organizations must build CFCs to bring together disparate teams—SecOps, incident response, threat intelligence, threat hunting, and others to create a streamlined threat detection, response, and manage workflow in a collaborative environment.

CFCs help SOC teams in establishing security collaboration toward threats. SOC teams can take part in collective defense to promote security collaboration among their peer organizations with the help of CFCs that combine threat intelligence sharing with threat response using advanced orchestration and automation solutions against emerging threats. They fuel collective defense and assist security teams in making improved decisions on incident response.

Summing Up

A strong security posture takes more than having the right solutions in place, organizations also need to strategize robust plans to ensure they respond to every threat the right way. While prevention is better than cure, it’s not always possible. The smart move is to leverage real-time defenses to tackle any incidents that arise.

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