In an ever-changing threat landscape, keeping on top of how exposed your security posture is can mean the difference between disaster and success. But how do you stay abreast of how exposed you are?
At this point, we can skip the preamble about how important security has become: it’s now a ubiquitous part of our day-to-day lives, after all. From single sign-on (SSO) to multi-factor authentication (MFA) and many a lecture around not reusing passwords, we’re all becoming better trained on staying secure.
At an organisational level, however, maintaining excellent security is a more complicated matter. Suddenly, there are more surfaces to be aware of, with IT managers and individual users having to invest time and resources into watching for threat exposure in a landscape that continues to become more complex and intimidating as time goes on.
So, how do we simplify this process, allowing teams to monitor the entire IT estate – and keep an eye on how exposed the organisation really is?
Developing a Clearer View
The key word here is ‘simplify’. As our IT estates evolve and more attack surfaces become available for threat actors to exploit, staying secure can seem like a far more daunting activity than just a few years ago.
Developing a simple, clear, and persistent view of the entire estate, then, is the answer. To do this, we need to gain a grasp on how the organisation is performing in a few key areas.
How Safe Are Identities?
As our digital identities have become more prevalent, so too has the need for secure identity and access management. Are individuals being granted the right access to the right data at the right time? Are there too many admins? And is access being revoked once an account holder moves through or leaves the organisation? Properly monitoring and managing user identities is an activity rife with easy wins, immediately closing internal gaps in security and preventing successful threat actors from moving through the organisation post-breach.
How Safe Are Working Practices?
Recent events have forced us to adopt new ways of working, with more employees operating remotely than ever before. While this is exciting and indicative of a fascinating new future for the workplace, it also comes with security caveats. Are remote devices being managed, for example? Are they secured, and could you recover them if necessary? Knowing which devices are being managed and are properly protected will save a lot of heartbreak – and keeps remote employees securely within the perimeter.
Are Users Making the Most of Defences?
As we’ve previously discussed, your organisation’s security is only as successful as your employee buy-in. That’s because the success of your security investment depends on employees using the features and solutions on offer. Getting a view on how many accounts are using MFA, for example, will highlight if there’s a problem – and allow organisations to counter with additional training or reinvestment in new features.
The Best View in the House
We know that knowing how exposed we are relies on keeping an eye on various aspects of the IT estate and user behaviour, but how many organisations are confident that they’re doing this successfully? Can they spot problem patterns in these areas, if needed?
This is where our partners and their customers truly benefit from Surveil, our cloud asset management platform. Aside from optimising licensing costs and productivity, Surveil helps organisations to develop a clearer view of their security posture, highlighting user behaviour, feature adoption, and preventable security gaps.
The result is a much greater level of confidence in how exposed an organisation is, with actionable insights to maximise the effectiveness of these insights.
Closing the Gaps
Someone wise once said “you don’t know what you don’t know”, and this is particularly true when it comes to security. To demystify security, organisations need to simplify the view of their IT environment and act on smart recommendations to close security gaps. The result is confidence in the current security posture, with resources freed up to prepare for the next threa long before it’s on the horizon. They were right: knowledge really is power.
Interested in helping your customers to develop a powerful view of their security posture through a Surveil partnership? Let’s talk.
