According to research by Forrester, 55% of organizations use 20 or more tools for their security and operations. While it’s important to protect every aspect of your IT infrastructure, buying every security tool available isn’t always the best solution. Integrating several security tools at once can be difficult to manage, especially if they’re all from different vendors. This can cause your infrastructure to become unnecessarily large and complex, which can lead to security gaps.

Source: Forrester

Do You Have Gaps in Your Security Stack?

An organization’s security stack consists of all the tools, technologies, platforms and vendors used to protect data and manage security. The larger an organization’s security stack, the harder it is to properly manage and ensure it stays updated. This can lead to backdoors hackers can exploit to enter your network and launch attacks.

The more security tools integrated, the greater amount of alerts being generated. Managing and investigating these alerts take a lot of time and effort and can result in a lot of false positives. As a result, organizations miss important alerts because they are either too overwhelmed or don’t take any alerts seriously. To overcome these issues, organizations must evaluate their cybersecurity stack to ensure they are implementing the right level of security protection and controls for their business.

3 Ways to Minimize Security Gaps

1. Assess your security framework

The security tools in your IT infrastructure should be strategically implemented to align with your organization’s security framework. Once you’ve established a good security framework, you can assign the necessary tools to meet each category. Your security framework should drive your security strategy and the tools you implement, not the other way around. A popular industry standard framework is the NIST framework, which is designed to help organizations better understand, manage, and reduce cybersecurity risks.

Assessing your security risk profile with a security risk assessment is also a good idea to help validate the security tools in your infrastructure. Security risk assessments analyze IT environments to determine an organization’s cyber risks and their potential impacts. It’s important that organizations understand the unique risks to their business to ensure they are taking the right actions to prevent these risks and minimize any harm.

2. Leverage unified security solutions

To best optimize their security stack, organizations must focus on gaining visibility across their infrastructure while using intelligent analytics to make decisions. This is best achieved through using unified security solutions that take a holistic approach to security by combining the best features into one solution.

Integrating turnkey solutions rather than those that only serve one-off functions will help reduce the number of tools in your security stack. For example, having a firewall is great but you will need security experts to monitor, and investigate firewall logs to ensure your network is being protected. Instead of having to install a separate firewall monitoring tool and hiring experts to investigate and respond to alerts, integrating a firewall solution that includes these features, like Secure IT – Firewall, will help you save time and money.

3. Use automated detection

As mentioned earlier, keeping up with the vast amount of cyber threats can be overwhelming. A security system that combines automation with human expertise increases the efficacy and efficiency of detecting threats. Jolera’s investment in hybrid intelligence combines human and machine intelligence with proprietary technology to help manage and secure IT environments. Our security information and event management (SIEM) system uses AI and machine learning capabilities to analyze and detect potential threats within your entire network.

For more information on how Jolera can help your organization defend against the latest threats, contact us today.