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Prevent long IT security workdays through collaboration
From surprise zero-day vulnerabilities to new exploits surfacing in the wild, few things ruin an IT security analyst’s after-hours or vacation plans faster than having to work overtime because of a cyberattack.
Here’s a glimpse into how the story usually goes at most companies:
A horribly bad cybersecurity day
The first cup of morning coffee or tea is on your desk. Your fingers are crossed that no critical, urgent incident will surface toward the end of your workday so you can make it to your spouse’s birthday dinner at 6 pm.
All of a sudden at 4 pm, you get a notification about a vulnerability in software that you know is running somewhere on your network. First, you realize it has to be patched right away. Software as a service (SaaS) vulnerabilities account for 43% of all cybersecurity incidents, according to The Hacker News. A patch or configuration change could probably help you avoid most security breaches.
Second, you grasp that your day is about to go haywire because your company has multiple, disconnected systems. It also lacks a way to track its device and software inventory. With an average of 40% of IT spending going to shadow IT, according to Jamf, there’s a decent chance a rogue app wouldn’t show up on any official list anyway.
Because you can’t remediate what you can’t find—and you don’t know how the threat is affecting your users or critical systems—you have to pull in teams from other areas, such as risk management, IT asset management (ITAM), and IT operations management (ITOM). You’ll need their help to sift through siloed systems and track down where the application is installed.
Better call your spouse. It looks like an hourslong, cross-functional firefighting event is about to get underway—and you might be late for dinner.
Could modern IT security solutions help?
If this situation sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Few security teams consistently collaborate on risk reporting. Could all this chaos be avoided with better coordination? Is there a way for these separate teams to work together as one, in real time?
There definitely is. Moving to modern, integrated, and automated IT security solutions housed on a single platform can bring together multiple IT workflows. That can give teams comprehensive visibility to identify, react to, and resolve issues fast, within the workday—without disrupting their evening plans.
Automation to the rescue
With dashboards for automating security management, ITAM, ITOM, and other business-critical services on one platform, you can seamlessly shift your cyberthreat response from obfuscated to orchestrated. In addition to centralizing communications for all your event conversations in an instant messenger such as Microsoft Teams, imagine that you can:
See your entire IT estate: A robust configuration management database means you can search which devices are running which software, even down to the patch version.
Find software anywhere in your organization: A combination of agent-based and agentless discovery can help you monitor your network from the cloud or an endpoint device.
View devices and software together: Discovered software and purchasing data are combined and updated as assets.
Monitor for changes continuously: An AI-driven risk assessment tool constantly monitors for modifications.
Rank vulnerabilities by impact: A security operations tool collects and prioritizes vulnerability data based on potential consequences.
Manage software without intervention: Automated workflows detect, track, and trigger software patching actions for devices that connect to the network, and update asset data for their related software lifecycles.
Track risk levels in real time: With just a few mouse clicks, you can prioritize emerging threats as they evolve.
Keep key players updated: Risk analysts can stay apprised of changes and remediations on their tailored dashboards.
Leave a digital trail: The platform captures a history of every action to show data and verify the issues were managed properly for compliance audits.
Orchestrated vulnerability response
Modern, connected solutions give this story a happy ending. Instead of chaotic, manual, and time-consuming processes, IT teams get an integrated, automated, single-platform approach that makes problems manageable within the workday.
When risk management, ITAM, IT security, and ITOM are natively integrated and orchestrated, organizations benefit from visibility, cyberthreat remediation, and governance to reduce risk. More efficient work means less firefighting—and more time for after-hours celebrations.
Find out more about managing vulnerabilities on a single platform in our ebook, Same cyberthreat, different story.
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