Provided by Prostream SA & Ctrl Digital ZA.
Actionable data is any information that can be used to take action or gives enough insight into the future to help decision-makers identify the appropriate action. With the help of advanced analytics and data processing, actionable data enables companies to identify mistakes, seize opportunities, improve performance, and ultimately make better business decisions.
Risk reduction, threat management, and cybersecurity posture improvement are critical goals of any agile enterprise. What concerns companies most isn’t the growing number of vulnerabilities and changes occurring or concerns of being non-compliant. Instead, the main concern is determining whether those changes, vulnerabilities, and compliance issues can be detected and addressed through cybersecurity platforms so that potential risks can be addressed before any actual harm occurs.
The Scenario
Cyber-attacks on big-name organizations have made the news recently. Many industries continue to push for third-party connections to their networks and the adoption of SaaS products to remain competitive. The world of business has been transformed by cloud-based solutions, with organizations adopting an average of 3.7 public cloud services by end of 2021, according to Flexera.
However, this adoption does not come without risks. These circumstances have prompted organizations to reevaluate the effectiveness of their cyber-security controls. In this age of digital transformation, the same tools you have used for years to manage your security posture won’t work. Instead, security teams can take back control of their network endpoints with reliable, actionable data, allowing them to remain a trusted provider, a preferred partner, and a better investment.
The Solution
Step 1: Cyber Transformation
Cyber security is often approached reactively by organizations, meaning the security function struggles to keep up with business and technology shifts. Cyber security transformations enable your organization to rapidly identify, reduce, and adapt to cyber threats.
More security managers and IT support staff have been hired. Your vendor onboarding assessment now includes cyber-security questions, and your employees receive yearly training on breach prevention. Cyber hygiene in today’s digital world requires program-wide transformation and continuous management because of the sophistication of cyber-criminals.
It might sound overwhelming, but you can actually fight off cyber-threats by utilizing data correctly. Incorporating current metrics into your networks’ endpoints allows security managers to offer views of your entire network (and the risks within); quantify financial losses associated with network risks, and communicate cyber-security risks effectively to the board of directors.
Step 2: Identify Network Risks
As evident as that might sound, we’re talking about something much bigger than many security teams’ monthly or quarterly assessments. Intruders can infiltrate networks through seemingly insignificant entry points, third-party networks, or by exploiting software or devices that are not supposed to be there. Therefore, it’s crucial to gain a complete picture of every endpoint on your network and determine whether or not there is a risk associated with them.
Monitoring your entire network continuously without manual effort or initiation from your security team using automated data-scanning technology will quickly identify and resolve risks. Determining all of the risks within your enterprise’s network will also help your team prioritize and strategize remediation efforts. If your network is not fully understood, it is impossible to allocate resources efficiently to address the most pressing risks. Deploying an automated risk monitoring tool is an essential first step in transforming to manage risk better continuously.
Step 3: Quantify Financial Risk
To best benefit your company, you’ll want to prioritize risk management based on a complete understanding of your network’s financial risk landscape. Most, if not all, business decisions are made based on what is most beneficial to the organization’s fiscal performance: why should your cyber-security decisions be any different?
Focus on mitigating risks based on the potential financial impact of vulnerabilities rather than addressing them on an ad-hoc basis. By exploiting financial data to help inform decision-making, risk managers can help reduce financial and cyber risks within their organizations and promote business continuity.
Step 4: Make Cyber-Security a Board-Level Concern
Increasingly, executives are interested in the performance of cyber security. This year, large, reputable companies have been significant targets of cyber-attacks, resulting in severe financial losses and reputational damage. As a result, managers of security departments need to demonstrate how their organizations are protecting themselves against ransomware, where cyber-security money is allocated, and how their organization rates compared to the competition.
Practical tools are needed to communicate the importance of cybersecurity risk management to business decision-makers. To implement a company-wide security transformation, cyber-security data needs to be presented in easy-to-understand performance reports. Reports must be high-level and provide enough actionable detail for decisions to be made while still meeting the expectations of members who might not have considered cybersecurity previously.
The Conclusion
Businesses are always seeking insights that will enable them to make better, more secure business decisions. Any business depends on data, and if you can’t turn data into actionable information, it has no use. Companies in the modern era require solutions like the Prostream Secure Data Ecosystem, which enable you to produce high-quality analytics from various aspects of operations in real-time without the need for complex systems.
“Data that cannot be applied in a specific context is simply noise or “dirty” data. In the past, when we talked about “data cleansing,” we meant the process of manipulating data to make it useful for particular representations or calculations. The same thing happens today, only at a much higher volume, with much more computing power, and at a much more granular level of detail. Many “New Age” tools exist that clients can use to achieve actionable data at scale. Prostream has developed the concept of the “Prostream Secure Data Ecosystem”, a collection of software tools, methods, and hardware that can be brought to bear on an organization’s operations to enable predictability, visibility, identification, and prevention of threats. By leveraging secure and comprehensive data, we enable companies to connect the dots and take proper steps forward.” – Leon Meyer, Business Unit Manager at Prostream Data.
