Context is Key: Forcepoint’s first annual cybersecurity leadership breakfast in Canada

Speakers from AWS, Raytheon Canada, Calian, Titus and Forcepoint’s Engineering and Product Management teams tackled strategies for secure cloud adoption, the importance of analytics to provide context and the ever-increasing need for human-centric cybersecurity.

The biggest takeaway from the breakfast: When moving to the cloud, context is key.

For government agencies moving to the cloud, having a data protection strategy is especially important. When deploying the latest and greatest cybersecurity solutions, many agencies struggle to keeping up with gruelling compliance and regulatory standards, especially as they move to the cloud. And as analysts struggle to triage, the endless list of alerts, incident response teams grow frustrated and there is an increased likelihood of security blind spots within agencies. So how can government agencies keep up?

By integrating behavioral analytics with other security technologies, agencies can ensure alerts are prioritized based on risk and tuned to meet regulatory requirements and other internal benchmarks. With this risk-adaptive security approach, data from numerous sources is fused with analytics to ensure context is provided to respond to risk and adapt policies down to an individual user level. A risk adaptive solution can adapt protection dynamically and apply monitoring and enforcement controls, offering protection based on the risk level of users and the value of data accessed. This enables security organizations to quickly understand risky behavior and automate the enforcement of policies, dramatically reducing the quantity of alerts requiring investigation and providing more efficient cybersecurity—controlling data and access on-premises, on endpoints, and into the cloud.

The Three biggest areas of opportunity for risk-adaptive security within government agencies

There were several use cases for risk-adaptive security discussed at our breakfast but some of the most notable ones that agencies are facing today include:

Securing the use of cloud applications

Deploying a CASB solution can help you discover and assess risk from unsanctioned cloud apps and control sanctioned cloud app use. Through a hands-on evaluation, ESG (Enterprise Strategy Group) discovered that Forcepoint CASB reduces threat response times, grants visibility and context into user activity and controls user access to cloud apps from different locations/device. Read the report.

Reducing the volume of alerts and automating policy enforcement

Agencies can solve the fundamental challenges of traditional DLP deployments and more effectively protect sensitive information through Dynamic Data Protection (DDP). Forcepoint DDP automates policy enforcement to dynamically respond to changes in risk within an organization to reduce the volume of alerts that need to be triaged, enhance flexibility with granular enforcement controls, individualize one-to-one enforcement of policies and increase productivity with proactive, dynamic, and automated enforcement. Learn more 

Insider Threat prevention, detection, and response

Striking a balance between maximizing productivity and minimizing risk requires a security program that can identify and respond to an insider threat. Watch this recent webcast with Forcepoint’s Senior Security Strategist Homayun Yaqub, where he discusses the foundations that underpin an effective program, including: refining analytics to better understand the intersection between people and data, operationalizing CARTA as the next step in insider threat program development and addressing insider risk as a core business concern. Listen to the webcast on this topic.

Securing agency data and enabling users to work quickly and efficiently will continue to be a journey given today’s cyber landscape. By deploying a risk-adaptive and human-centric approach to cybersecurity, agencies can enable better decision-making and more efficient security for increased productivity.