There are many critical challenges in information security. With data breaches constantly threatening modern enterprise, the challenge of counteracting these breaches is increases as time passes. Worse, detecting breaches can take months with even more time to recover. When companies are unable to quickly respond to these breaches, they are at risk of exposing valuable data and confidential information.
The long process of identifying and responding to threats is attributed to the disconnect between security and IT tools like:
Numerous, disjoined tools
- Lack of automation
- Organizational opacity
- Multiple, unsecured data sets, and security runbooks
These inefficiencies trigger other issues with the manual processes associated with traditional security. Defining and tracking performance metrics can be difficult, and these manual processes may force highly-trained employees to focus on low-level tasks, resulting in high turnover rates.
The ability for organizations to respond to security threats and vulnerabilities efficiently depends on how well they can rate their organization on the following checklist:
- Rely on a single source of truth across security and IT
- Prioritize all security incidents and vulnerabilities
- Automate basic security tasks
- Integrate with the configuration management database (CMDB)
- Ensure your security runbook is followed
- Quickly identify authorized approvers and subject matter experts
- Collect detailed metrics to drive post-incident reviews and enable process improvements.
The best solution enables efficient responses to incidents and streamlines the remediation process, while also letting companies clearly and effectively answer the question “are we secure?”
There are a couple of ways an enterprise can react when a high-profile vulnerability arises. The first is a traditional approach, wherein manual processes cause analysts to struggle with gathering the information required to provide the CISO with an accurate assessment of the impact. This causes critical systems to be vulnerable, which puts the business at risk for a data breach.
However, there is a better approach to limiting vulnerability in an enterprise. An integrated response platform can immediately respond to this vulnerability and begin the following steps:
- Automatically pulling data from the vulnerability into the security operations system i.e. mobile device management
- Vulnerable items are correlated with the CMDB and prioritized based on business service impact
- Built-in workflows ensure analysts follow the security runbook
- Once critical items are patched, security and IT create a plan to address remaining vulnerabilities
- CISO is briefed and security operations generate a post-incident review
Service Now is changing the way people work and making modern enterprise operations faster than ever. ServiceNow allows companies to design, structure and automate their workflow while removing dependencies on email and spreadsheets. ServiceNow equips all departments like IT, security, HR, facilities and every other department with service management.
Want to know more about the platform that was built to manage everything as a service? Click on the link below to watch a quick video and to download the whitepaper What You Need to Know about Efficient Security Response.
