Three key pillars of threat visibility

When keeping up with the newest security threats, being able to detect an attack while it's still in progress, as well as understand the full scope of the attack is pivotal. According to a study conducted by Forrester, one of the primary factors keeping organisations from assessing and managing attacks successfully was a lack of visibility into their network security.

For companies to overcome this, they need visibility into all available data from logs and packets, to endpoints and threat intelligence, as well as a complete contextual overview across all those sources.

Here are three key pillars which will help make threats visiblea valuable first step toward tackling potential attacks.

Data analytics

Data analytics provides the opportunity to detect threats and prioritise responses. Once threats become visible, analytics can make it easier for a security decision maker to choose a direction to defend from.

This includes behavioural analytics, which detect when user behaviour signifies a potential threat, data science modelling to identify threats, and machine learning to create baselines for which network and endpoint activities are considered normal, and which ones aren't.

Threat intelligence

Threat intelligence from analysts and experts, as well as crowdsourced intelligence from user communities, adds layers of context which can be used to identify threats and plan responses. Specifically, threat intelligence is data about what threats an organisation currently faces, have previously faced, or might face in the future. Knowing this information allows companies to keep up to date on potential risks and create targeted responses to keep their data safe.

This intelligence can be applied across logs, packets and endpoints to look at threat data in context and prioritise responses accordingly.

Business drivers

When your organisation is overwhelmed by threat data, it can be difficult for the security team to know which threat to fight off first. But if they know the business context the threat data appears in, they can act quickly and decisively against whatever poses the greater risk to the business.

Business context is the information that lets your team know, for example, whether a server at imminent risk for attack holds all source code for the organisation, or nothing more significant than the daily lunch menu.