Security Analytics

Current Challenges in the IT Security Landscape

Cyber security is one of the most pressing challenges that global organizations are facing in this internet driven and interconnected IT business world. Cyber threats are increasing in terms of cost, severity, and complexity, day by day. As the threat landscape continues to evolve in terms of both sophistication and scale, the need for securing an organization’s assets has become paramount. However, with the traditional security technologies and off the shelf security products, organizations are not able to combat the diverse set of cyber-attacks enabled by highly focused threat actors. Organizations require intelligent and innovative steps to defend and keep ahead of the new age advanced cyber-attacks. Smaller organizations are deploying deeper network defenses and endpoint protections to address these security challenges. The medium to large organizations is considering the implementation of security analytics as a key step in gaining a more comprehensive view of their defense and security posture. Read our blog: What is happening in the Cyber Threat Landscape?

Significance of Analytics- driven IT Security

In this age of Big Data, a vast amount of data is getting generated in almost all the fields of business from disparate channels and IT security space is also not an exemption. Big data Analytics and Predictive Analytics play a larger role in churning out valuable business insights from these large chunks of data in various business sectors. In the field of IT security also, analytics play a key role in deriving valuable security intelligence. A new generation of security analytics tools can play a key role in analyzing the massive amount of data collected from multiple security devices/ sources and deriving insights from it. This analytics- driven approach holds greater relevance in the case of new attack models including Advanced Persistent Threats. In the case of Advanced Persistent Threats or (APT) which is multi- staged and multi- vector in nature, many organizations may not even realize there is an ongoing attack silently happening inside their network. In such instances, it is highly essential to connect the dots between these multiple events happened in multiple stages and arrive at the best defense strategy to avoid future incidents. The conventional security technologies and devices cannot provide the analytics based information in the case of attacks like APT. Advanced Cyber security analytics and threat intelligence sharing can be helpful in such instances, especially for early detection and rapid defense. Organizations have to defend the increasing number of cyber-attacks through greater commitment to data collection and security analytics tools. Even though security analytics is not the first line of defense for SMB’s it is becoming an increasingly significant method in the IT security space.

How Security Analytics Works?

In any organization, there are security point products to analyze unusual traffic between servers which might be a malware attack, non-compliant or unusual flow of data, data egression from suspicious locations or systems. Security analytics tools supplement these data with analytics capabilities to figure out the attack patterns, potential threats or attacks or the possible methods of attacks. Efficient security analytics tools must analyze and filter the vast amount of event data per second in real time from multiple sources including traditional security devices, logs, audit files, internet and emails, social platforms, sensors, smart devices etc. to uncover hidden insights, detect attack patterns and provide relevant insights to mitigate threats. These analytics tools are not meant to replace existing cyber security measures, systems or applications, but rather complement them by providing a more comprehensive view of the security posture of an IT organization.

Top Benefits of Security Analytics

• Faster detection and remediation of cyber threats

• Real time visibility, to effectively detect, analyze, and adapt to future attacks

• Better explore the root cause of cyber security incidents

• Better tracking and reduction of insider threats, frauds and data leakage

• Flexible and cost effective deployment

 Happiest Minds’ play in the field of IT Security Analytics