So how does a business become more secure, agile and future proof? It requires the discipline to have a clear vision and roadmap to deploy and manage your enterprise security, and the ability to scale your services to meet the needs as your organization expands, whether through organic growth or Mergers and Acquisitions. While the methodology involves evaluation, acquisition, deployment and management of fully integrated services, in this post we will focus on the management of the enterprise security. The management involves constant risk assessment and remediation efforts – a combination of being proactive and also being prepared to react rapidly and resolve incidents. It is imperative that 4 Pillars of Service Management are instantiated and adhered to.
The Four Cornerstones of Managing Enterprise Security
Let’s take a quick look at the four cornerstones of Managing Enterprise Security as depicted below:
Service Administration
There are several core activities that need to take place regularly to ensure that your organization remains secure, agile and future proof as your business evolves. Continuous service administration of core functions in user management, authentication, policy and rule management as well as the maintenance and hygiene of system maintenance, integration and enhancement to meet business demand. Efforts must be predominately put into proactively managing the security services. That is the key to staying more secure. The more proactive an organization is, the less time the organization spends in fighting fires. The Service Administration involves a set of activities and tasks that are determined based on established cybersecurity roadmap and governance. To be proactive requires that an organization has full clarity, which is possible when service strategy is well established. More on Service Strategy later.
Service Monitoring
To ensure that you harden your business, proactive monitoring and escalation is key to ensure that effective incident management and security change management is conducted. This is not only true for your business applications but should also be foundational to implementing effective DevSecOps procedures and monitoring your internal assets with same rigor as you do business applications. The monitoring needs to be comprehensive with the goal that all signals from various integrated services are subscribed to. This in turn will provide an organization full visibility of potential risks. If the risk is identified then the process must be clear by way of Service Administration to remediate that risk.
Service Strategy
We have seen a significant increase in cybersecurity attacks in the past year. The intensity and frequency of this is expected to increase according to industry experts. There are several aspects that constantly need to be taken into consideration to ensure that keep your business future proof.
These include:
- Your policy and requirements for Vendor Management
- Frequent review of aligning your Cyber Security Posture with Strategy and Roadmap activities
- Supporting the needs of Business Review and Reporting through a secure collaboration platform
- Standardizing policies, MFA enrollment and authentication across the enterprise
- A Zero Trust Assessment that provides the following:
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- Current State Security Assessment
- Future State Security Assessment Recommendations pertaining to:
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- Building a solid Zero Trust vision, strategy, roadmap and capabilities
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- Avoiding costly data breaches and defending against cyberattacks
- Ensuring workforce is productive and secure, regardless of their work location and devices
- Streamlining workforce and customer onboarding and offboarding
- Securing applications, assets, data, devices and services
- Implementing risk-based access policies for frictionless access
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- Providing continuous, adaptive authentication and authorization
- Implementing Zero Trust as a service – never trust and always verify
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- The diagram below illustrates the stages of Zero Trust adoption and the goal for every business is to get to the highest stage across multiple factors that determine maturity. In addition to remediation, BeyondID offers ZTA (Zero Trust Assessment) as an ongoing service that will monitor KPIs that will provide a continually evolving measure of where you stand with Zero Trust.
Reactive Resolution Capabilities
Finally, we need to set our sight on where and by whom the activities are supported. All four of these cornerstone activity sets should be performed in the Secure Operations Center or SOC for short.
Your SOC core component is to effectively and quickly engage Break/Fix activities and root cause analysis and provide in the moment “How-To“ help and resolution to your entire organization. Secure Operations Center in our current business climate has risen to the top of the priority chain to protect companies. Companies who cannot afford to build out their own SOC and do not have certified staff qualified with the right core skills sets to perform these functions will be extremely vulnerable in the short, medium, and long term. Industry experts urge companies to find a partner to provide these services. At the onset of the pandemic, many companies were caught off guard as they needed to enable a remote workforce overnight that was not anticipated or contemplated to the scale, level of severity and duration that materialized. A lack of planning and action to address your needs for Service management will leave your business vulnerable. It is not a question of “if” but rather the frightening realization that if you are not prepared for “when” then you could fall victim to a cyberattack. Secure Operations Center or SOC is no longer a “nice to have” luxury for businesses but a definite need.
Contact our Zero Trust Security Consultants
BeyondID is a managed identity services provider that helps companies in every industry protect and grow their business. Led by an experienced and exceptionally passionate team with extensive backgrounds in cyber security, Identity and Access Management, cloud services, and Zero Trust Security. Contact BeyondID for all your cybersecurity needs today.