An ecosystem exchange will allow IT and security personnel to map, analyze and act upon threat intelligence in one place. To effectively secure agencies against cyberthreats, these personnel must have full visibility into an integrated network of systems and tools. But unfortunately, they often don’t have that visibility.
Siloes Cause Poor Security Posture and Inefficient Operations
IT teams have to manage multiple tools deployed throughout the agency network. While each technology is added for a specific purpose, they are often added in siloes – without consideration for how that tech might interact positively or negatively with other systems. These systems are also added across diverse environments, including on-premise and in the cloud.
This prevents security personnel from maintaining complete situational awareness, as purpose-deployed systems increase the enterprise landscape while also decreasing visibility.
Not only is the network complex, these systems often don’t share data, which makes correlating their functionality and security extremely difficult. But given the massive amounts of security threats hitting agencies every day, security teams must have context to prioritize alerts. They need to identify, contain, investigate and mitigate the most critical threats first.
A Single-Pane-of-Glass Visibility to Protect Against Cyberattacks
With an ecosystem exchange in place, security departments can gain single-pane-of-glass visibility into threats wherever they arise and proactively protect against cyberattacks. With all that information in one place, they can prioritize response based on critical contextual data from other systems throughout the network.
They can respond to incidents faster by using an ecosystem exchange to automate common workflows and share threat intelligence or indicators of compromise across the ecosystem. This allows agencies to get the most return from their existing network security investments, because they can correlate and act upon the information generated from them strategically, quickly and easily.
Implementing an ecosystem exchange means taking a unified approach to cybersecurity, automating incident response, and prioritizing threats using context.
This article is part of GovLoop’s recent course created in partnership with Infoblox and Red River, “Make Your Cybersecurity Strategy a Winning One.” Access the full course here.
