The acceleration of digitization initiatives was paramount to ensure business continuity during this global crisis. As we rebuild economic stability in 2021, technology – especially automation and security – will play a significant role in positioning enterprises to return to growth.

Risk exposure-based remediation

Security is a continual game of chess: 2020 was a record-breaking year for new vulnerabilities. The rapid expansion to the cloud and an explosion of IoT devices, together with a severe shortage of security personnel, left enterprises struggling to deal effectively and proactively with new security risks.

Today, security leaders are still challenged with how to mitigate risk through a lens of context and evaluation based on the potential exposure of the highest risk vulnerabilities. For example: Once a vulnerability is discovered, the average time to fix is 4.4 weeks. According to AT&T, 63% of leading organizations ignore more than 25% of security events and alerts.

Rather than the traditional one-size-fits-all scanning and patching approach, defenders need contextual awareness and insights into where the riskiest vulnerabilities live on their networks. Next, proactive actions should be prioritized to close those specific vulnerabilities. Then, smart automation can leverage these contextual insights to help remediate vulnerabilities better, faster and with less drain on human capital.

Automation of alert triage and analysis

Keeping pace with the remote workforce and digital acceleration as a whole requires more agility than ever before. While many invest millions in security controls to block, detect, prevent or respond to attacks, vulnerabilities and misconfigurations across hybrid environments are being exploited routinely, leaving organizations exposed to material cybersecurity and compliance risks. The growth of tech stacks, required security policies and manual change management have inadvertently introduced more new risks than ever before.

Enterprise complexity drives the need for security automation to identify patterns, manage security posture and improve compliance. With prescriptive analytics and automation, security can benefit from action-oriented data about existing or emerging threats. This context can inform educated decisions to increase threat remediation speed and accuracy. With smart automation, data breaches caused by human error can also be proactively reduced.  

Operational resiliency

Security and risk leaders must anticipate the growing trends that are forcing companies to evolve business models. As remote working becomes our new normal, the relentless pace of digital transformation and cloud adoption is challenging traditional security approaches. The need for operational resiliency across the business, supporting tech stacks, and security posture has never been greater.

An insight-led approach enables defenders to proactively identify, prioritize and remediate potential attacks that could significantly damage business reputation and customer trust. With a unified approach across security policy and threat management, security leaders can now focus on the most strategic business initiatives to securely enable the business at scale and speed. 

In the wake of the pandemic’s disruption, building resiliency into business strategy is essential. Resiliency can only be achieved by having full visibility across the enterprise environment and running scenarios based on new threats and environmental factors. With strong security posture management as a foundation, future growth and stability are possible.