What is Adaptive Security?

Adaptive Security is an approach to cybersecurity that analyzes behaviors and events to protect against and adapt to threats before they happen. With an Adaptive Security Architecture, an organization can continuously assess risk and automatically provide proportional enforcement that can be dialed up or down.

Organizations today are facing constant security threats from both external and internal sources. They need to be vigilant and prepared and to maintain a robust set of security policies that can be applied across their enterprise. Due to the constant evolution of security threats, it is no longer enough for organizations simply to use blocking mechanisms or after-the-event procedures to prevent and respond to attacks. They must use more advanced security platforms that are able to adapt to the latest threats and use dynamic protect and response mechanisms.

Traditional security services are no longer enough for today's modern business. In an agile business environment that is increasingly exposed to high-impact, sophisticated threats on a daily basis, responding to incidents after they have happened can result in lost revenue and damaged reputations.

Adaptive security provides real-time network security monitoring that scrutinizes the network for anomalies, malicious traffic and vulnerabilities. If a threat is detected, the platform automatically implements security measures that counter the threat in a number of ways. This includes the following methods:

Preventative: Preventative capabilities allow enterprises to create products, processes, and policies that counter-attack any cyber attack.

Detective: The detective layer of adaptive security identify the attacks that are not caught by the preventative layer. The aim is to reduce the time taken for threats to be detected and stopping potential risks from becoming actual risks.

Retrospective: This layer digs even deeper into the detail, looking for the threats that were not detected by the detective layer. During retrospective analysis, forensic information is generated that can be used to avoid future incidents.

Predictive: And finally, the predictive layer provide IT teams with alerts about external events. By monitoring hacker activities, this layer also anticipates new types of attack and provides information that can be used to further enhance the detective and preventative layers.

Adaptive security offers many benefits over traditional security platforms. How you choose to implement adaptive security will depend on the size of your organization and the design of your network, but here are some of the most important benefits:

• Monitoring and response in real-time - Thanks to the real-time evaluation of events, users, systems and network traffic, immediate, dynamic and autonomous resolutions are possible.
• Prioritization and filtering - Adaptive security allows IT teams to apply advanced analytics and machine learning processes that can detect security breaches that would not be obvious by monitoring the system alone.
• Reduce the attack surface - Adaptive security can shrink the size of the attack surface and limit the amount of damage a threat can cause.
• Reduce resolution times - Security threats are detected and dealt with swiftly by a combination of manual and automated processes.

No matter what the size of your network, the nature of your business or the threats you are exposed to, adaptive security is just that - it can adapt to the needs of your business and evolve to ensure you have the policies and procedures in place to protect you from the existing threat landscape. By adopting an adaptive security architecture, your organization can get a better understanding of strengths and weaknesses across the environment and access security requirements with greater accuracy.

Forcepoint Risk-Adaptive Protection (RAP) is one of the easiest and most effective ways to move towards an adaptive security architecture. RAP leverages user behavior to automatically adjust Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies to prevent exfiltration from the highest-risk individuals.