INSIGHT
WINNING THE CYBER BATTLE RAWAD DARWICH, REGIONAL SALES MANAGER, FIDELIS CYBERSECURITY, EXPLAINS WHY IT’S TIME TO RE-IMAGINE THE SECURITY STACK.
Rawad Darwich, Fidelis Cybersecurity
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ata security is still the number one IT concern for businesses worldwide. A research carried out by ThoughtWorks in 2019 revealed that 33 percent of UK business leaders said that ‘data safety and cyber risk’ was a bigger concern than the challenges of Brexit. Roll on six months and those concerns have increased exponentially as millions of people are now working from home due to the coronavirus pandemic. The story is the same for businesses in many countries across the globe and to address this, CIOs and CDOs are consistently ‘adding’ bolt-on security measures. As new threats emerge, organisations add to their security stack by bolting on more cybersecurity tools. Combine the fact that many of the security ‘solutions’ are from different vendors with the problem of under-utilisation, not only are there a range of capabilities that are redundant but the organisation’s entire security measures are complex and offer little to no benefits. Here’s a fact from
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Fidelis Security’s latest survey: less than seven percent of respondents were using their full security stack. Now that’s a worrying statistic. The negative impact of too many security layers As technology advances, so does the threat level to businesses, which push them to be more reactive in dealing with the resulting cybersecurity issues. There has often been the situation whereby security tools have been implemented in order to address a specific problem with little thought as to how that integrates with existing systems. Fidelis found that some organisations have as many as 75 different cybersecurity tools in use, ranging from various firewalls and antivirus tools to intrusion detection and intrusion prevention tools, advanced threat protection tools and singlepurpose endpoint agent technologies. In the drive towards digital transformation, magnified in recent months, this multi-layered Defense-in-
Depth approach has morphed into Defensein-Death as CIOs, CDOs and IT teams are discovering widespread under-utilisation. Couple that with a lack of automation and few cybersecurity professionals available, SOCs are struggling to deal with the influx of alerts from each and every cybersecurity tool, with many of those alerts having little or no context. Ultimately, this reactive approach will impact response time but more worryingly, as the capabilities of each security tool overlaps with another, more layers of complexity are added resulting in little to no benefit in terms of overall security against cyber threats. Many businesses lack a comprehensive streamlined security infrastructure that provides real time visibility of their cyberattack surface, or little understanding of their critical asset vulnerabilities.
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