Achieving Optimal Outcomes in Security Through Platformization

The cyberattack landscape continues to grow more widespread and more sophisticated, making life difficult for defenders. At the same time, the cybersecurity skills gap remains vast despite worldwide efforts to increase cybersecurity training and education pathways. The latest research from ISACA finds that the world needs another 4 million cybersecurity professionals.

Throwing more tools at the increased volume and sophistication of attacks is a common tactic, but the reality is that trying to address every issue with a different product (each with its own learning curve) isn’t sustainable or practical, and it only increases the skills gap.

Making it possible for cybersecurity teams to achieve the outcomes they need to protect their business requires a combination of two seemingly opposing objectives - efficiency and efficacy. The first priority is to maximize security efficacy despite an increasing volume of attacks leveraging an increasing number of techniques. Once an organization is appropriately protected, the optimal approach involves less management and operations overhead across security products, faster access to critical security visibility, and the ability to make changes and interpret data with less expertise.

The problem with point products

Most cybersecurity teams are under-resourced. And they’re grappling with a multitude of point products, each designed for a specific function. On average, organizations use 32 different solutions to secure their networks and systems. Many of these were implemented to protect particular segments of the business, such as a specific set of solutions to secure remote workers or cloud applications, while others were acquired to defend against threats like DNS attacks or file-based malware for campus locations.

Each of these solutions requires trained experts, has its own specific configurations, consoles, and rating systems, and each one gathers data into its own silo, with a corresponding unique set of reports and dashboards. This results in a disjointed patchwork of tools, making it difficult for most organizations to quickly and easily understand their security hygiene posture or how well they've deployed these security products to protect their environments.

These tools must all work in concert, but that's not easily achieved with point products. Integrating these tools manually is almost impossible, and attempts to do so can result in security misconfigurations that lead to security incidents, data breaches, and unauthorized access.

Embracing platformization

Platformization unifies multiple solutions and services into a single architecture with a shared data store and streamlined management. With native integrations, each component becomes more powerful than standalone products. This approach helps increase productivity, simplify operations, and extract the most value from data, all leading to better security outcomes and greater efficiency.

As platformization becomes essential to modern cybersecurity strategies, it enables comprehensive security while reducing complexity, helping teams achieve more with fewer resources.

Platformization security benefits and best practices

Using the platform approach should never entail giving up security efficacy for the sake of vendor consolidation or simplified management. If there is a corresponding set of point products in a given area, the minimum bar by which the “platform” component must be measured is the very best of those individual tools.

Flexibility and scalability are important. A platform needs to empower your company to gradually grow into using it. A total “rip and replace” of multiple security tools at once is far more complex than most enterprises are willing to attempt. It’s even harder when you factor in the differing replacement cycles of existing solutions. You need the option to adopt the platform piece by piece or all at once – whichever suits your organization best – while retaining the ability to cover all your security bases.

Finally, establish mechanisms for best practices. Purchasing a security platform doesn’t mean your work is done. Ongoing management needs to be embedded into rollout and deployment – and you need a system of checks and balances to ensure that as new products get deployed or things change, there’s a process for this.

Optimal security outcomes

As the enterprise attack surface widens, attackers continue to broaden their arsenal of attack techniques and targets. Many companies respond by deploying numerous “Band-Aid” security solutions, but this leads to increased complexity that’s difficult to manage. A platform approach enables lean cybersecurity teams to build a cohesive, streamlined infrastructure. By following best practices, you can develop an efficient security strategy that meets your organization’s unique needs.