Data Management and Security Intelligence Top-of-Mind for CISOs Today
Websense recently hosted a TRITON Advisory Board (TAB) event in San Diego where customers from around the country congregated to discuss security concerns. During the event, I had the opportunity to speak with several chief information security officers (CISOs) from various industries about what security ailments were top-of-mind. Given the current cyber threat landscape, the majority of attendees agreed that data management and security intelligence were paramount.
Data Management
Monitoring the movement of intellectual property (IP) is difficult as it is, but as more businesses move their data to the cloud, it gets increasingly complex. In many of my conversations, security professionals felt that they were losing control of their data—where it’s being stored, who’s handling it, how it’s being used, etc.
Today, most security teams are only able to track data at the endpoint. This includes activities occurring on PCs and mobile devices, for the most part. To help alleviate this issue, data managers can implement comprehensive DLP solutions in the cloud to fingerprint and effectively manage the flow of data. This will defuse the scenarios that threaten to expose the IP that security professionals are entrusted to protect.
Security Intelligence
To increase their success rate, cybercriminals are constantly elevating the sophistication of their attacks. In an effort to match their efforts, CISOs need to assemble security intelligence teams to keep pace and thwart malicious activity. These teams should consist of highly skilled individuals trained in the art of security analytics, able to analyze your network for security anomalies and report potential threats.
In addition, CISOs need to monitor network and user behaviors in real time to study the normalcy of data accessibility and traffic. Focusing on these behaviors yields insight into data interaction and allows security teams to determine if networks are being used to perform job functions or malicious alternatives. These behavioral analytics can expose insider threats, determine ecosystem misconfigurations and detect active threat vectors.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, CISOs agreed that implementing real-time threat protection and leveraging behavioral network data are vital in building a solid security defense system. To my original point, data management and security intelligence are the leading cornerstones in security programs today.
Has your organization been struggling to create an effective security program? If so, please drop us a line below or contact the Websense Office of the CSO for more information.