Page 46 - FCW, August 2019

The Next Wave of Cybersecurity Learn more at Carah.io/Cyber-SolarWinds
How teamwork
boosts security
Cross-team collaboration and user education are essential for network defense
Brandon Shopp
Vice President of Product Strategy for Security, SolarWinds
ADVANCES IN CLOUD computing and mobile technologies are essentially opening up new personal vectors for attack. Having more endpoints or points of presence makes it easier for adversaries to break into an agency’s infrastructure and exfiltrate data.
Protecting the perimeter is no longer enough because agencies might not own their infrastructure or the user device that connects to the network. Agencies need stronger forms of authentication and encryption, and they need to be able to detect adversaries as soon as they start breaching those defenses.
Educating end users
The No. 1 security threat to an organization is still its end users. With mobile technologies, for instance, employees can unwittingly install spyware on their personal devices, and as they interact with websites or applications or exchange data in the course of their jobs, an adversary can use that information to penetrate an organization’s systems.
Therefore, agencies must educate their employees through activities such as phishing attack simulations to see if people are following best practices and know what to do if they have concerns about an email message. Education needs to be an ongoing commitment. The types of attacks and tactics adversaries use
are constantly changing and evolving, and agencies shouldn’t let employees become complacent and revert to old behaviors.
Making security everybody’s job
New advances in technology are helping organizations manage the performance and security of complex IT environments. With a cloud access security broker, for instance, agencies can control shadow
IT, gain visibility into the cloud environment, and enforce security policies. In addition, behavioral analytics can flag activities that fall outside normal parameters for a particular user, which is often a sign that credentials have been compromised.
Some vendors, including SolarWinds®, are focusing on providing organizations with a single view into their networks, systems, applications and security operations so that they can achieve a higher level of visibility without jumping between products and manually correlating data.
Tools that can understand on-premises infrastructure as well as cloud and mobile environments are critical. Visibility into all those
correlations and interdependencies allows agencies to stay on top of performance issues and respond quickly to security concerns.
Ideally, they should have one security operations center staffed with people from the network, system, and security teams. Encouraging that level of collaboration allows agencies to more quickly identify the root cause of a problem and resolve it.
Security is everybody’s job, no matter the size of the agency. It requires everyone’s attention and vigilance.
Brandon Shopp is vice president of product strategy for security at SolarWinds.
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