The signs are clear: the cybersecurity status quo is not working.
Despite adopting new solutions and a focus on analyst training, and despite the millions spent on cybersecurity programs, security teams are still missing over 50% of cyber attacks. Those misses have a cost. According to a Statista report, 1,001 data breaches detected in the United States led to the exposure of 155.8 million records in 2020. Data breaches are also expensive. According to the latest IBM Cost of a Data Breach report, the average total cost of a data breach is $4.24 million, and remote work increases the cost of a data breach by $1.07 million. Data, reputations, and bottom lines are suffering.
What is going on?
The reality is, cybersecurity is based on assumptions, not fact. Are tools providing real value? Are processes working effectively? Are the analysts effective? To date, there has been no proven way to measure the real-world performance of cybersecurity people, processes, and technology.
Why the Current Approach Is Failing
Today’s approach to cybersecurity cannot confirm whether your people, processes, and technology are ready to defend an attack. Instead, businesses typically depend on compliance checklists to guide their security programs and the investments they make.
However, checklists miss a lot. Checklists don’t adapt to the changing threat landscape. Checklists don’t always provide useful guidance on how to implement and tune technology in your environment or on how to optimize your processes. Finally, checklists don’t give guidance on how to evaluate and improve the security analysts you depend on every day.
Under the existing paradigm, businesses do not know whether they are ready to respond to a cyber attack until it is too late. Most businesses only learn whether their people, processes, and technology are working after they have been targeted. When they find out they are not ready, those attacks result in significant losses of money, time, and reputation.
What if cybersecurity focused on actual readiness to resist attacks?
A New Paradigm: Continuous Readiness
Consider the United States military. There is no room for guesswork when the nation’s safety and security are at stake. Military units are organized around accomplishing a specific mission. Those units take continuous action centered on accomplishing that mission: tracking the evolving threat landscape, conducting live-fire training, and assessing performance all to make sure the force can effectively respond to threats. U.S. Cyber Command has a name for this: “continuous readiness.”
What if organizations treated securing their critical digital data assets like the military approaches their missions? While this is normal for military units, this is not the cybersecurity status quo. However, it is the direction cybersecurity is heading: SightGain brings the concept of continuous readiness to the SOC.
Continuous Readiness In the SOC
SightGain is the first solution that enables this approach for cybersecurity systems in the live production environment, allowing you to test your SOC’s readiness in a proactive and comprehensive way.
SightGain tests your actual production SOC against real threats by measuring whether your people, processes, and technology are working as they need to, and enable you to make the necessary changes to get them working better. SightGain gives you the data and the analytics to:
- Understand baseline SOC performance
- Make improvements across people, process, and technology
- Practice responses, update configurations, and ensure automated processes are working
- Identify gaps and redundancies in SOC infrastructure
- Provide individualized training
- Evaluate the return on security investments
To effectively execute continuous readiness in the SOC, you need hard data about what is actually working in your SOC, and about what changes or additions will most efficiently increase your readiness. You need to see this data in a clear, actionable way. And, you need to be able to see how your readiness changes over time, as both your SOC and the threat landscape evolve.
SightGain finally provides this visibility, allowing your SOC to go from a state of guesswork to a state of continuous readiness.
Are You Ready?
You know attackers are trying to find a way to your data. You know you need to be ready to face them. Readiness is an ongoing challenge, a cycle of continuously evaluating and strengthening how your people, processes, and technologies stand up under attack. Only after that process will you know the truth about how ready you are, and how you can target your limited time and resources to improve your readiness.
Cybersecurity is a challenge. Are you ready to consider a new and proven approach?? See how SightGain works today, and find out how to bring continuous readiness into your SOC.
