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Help your clients get proactive about cybersecurity

Proactive about cybersecurity by Quest

In my previous post, I pointed to several top security threats your clients face in attempting to protect their data and systems.

Cyberthreats like app attacks, web attacks, social engineering exploits, and ransomware are only a few of your customers’ concerns. They must also (or will soon) contend with breaches that steal or corrupt huge swaths of “big data,” the risks of trusting IoT (Internet of Things) devices and sensors , and the dangerous vulnerabilities of industrial control systems .

Cyber security solutions abound, of course, from firewalls, encryption, and endpoint protection to intrusion detection and identity/access management.

These and other tactical countermeasures are utterly necessary. But they are no longer sufficient.

Why? Because these solutions react and respond to cybersecurity events that have already happened.

Anticipation?

But what if we could anticipate cyber threats by putting together data from all our monitoring solutions and analyzing it so effectively that we’re able to predict the likelihood of a threat before it occurs – and then intervene to prevent it?

Well, we’re getting there.

New kinds of cybersecurity

Consider these developments:

Direct application monitoring and defense. By designing security capabilities into applications rather than layering on security afterward, we can produce apps able to perform essential security functions, notably authentication, authorization, and configuration.

This sort of direct application monitoring and defense relieves your clients of needing to understand which applications to monitor and how, and what security threats they may pose.

SIEM: proactive, predictive protection. Security Information Event Management (SIEM) aggregates event data produced by security devices, applications, systems, and network infrastructure, then correlates and analyzes it in real time to generate threat intelligence, anomaly detection, and behavior profiling that can detect otherwise unseen security breaches and improve your clients’ proactive, predictive protection.

The security operations center. Siloed cybersecurity solutions can be made far more effective when their threat intelligence is shared as quickly as possible, preferably machine-to-machine.

This is best accomplished via a holistic, intelligence-driven security operations center — in effect a cybersecurity force multiplier based on an adaptive architecture and context-aware components that brings new levels of visibility into your clients’ infrastructure.

Cybersecurity expertise when your clients need it

Such proactive cybersecurity requires expertise, which you may well not have. By 2020, the shortfall of trained IT security professionals is expected to reach 1.5 million .

But cybersecurity should never be trifled with, so it’s important that you engage the right cloud and managed security services provider to help you understand and address your clients’ needs with solutions customized to their precise requirements — not just technically, but also in terms of their business goals .

The right cloud and managed security services provider can ensure that your clients’ security stance is layered, up-to-date, resilient , and prepared to respond quickly and effectively to security incidents before they can do damage.

Meet the Author
Adam Burke is Quest's Vice President of Sales and Partnerships.
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