As organizations strive to be a frontrunner in the cloud-first economy, cybercriminals have picked up their pace to target them. The tools and technologies that make cloud powerful are increasingly coming under the radar of threat actors. Some of the recent prominent cyberattacks that successfully targeted software supply chains and energy pipelines have strongly underscored the need for cyber innovation. Time and again, threat actors have displayed innovation in attack techniques to invade organizational networks, steal sensitive data, and disrupt critical services. Realizing the sitch, how can organizations stay motivated in their cloud-first strategy? With the growing adoption of the cloud in the information technology ecosystem, cyber innovation should be the focal point.
Formidable Challenges in the Cloud-First Economy
With business workflows and applications moving to the cloud at an accelerated pace, organizations nowadays face a barrage of threats. The security issues and threats arising from cloud-based infrastructure include misconfigurations, unauthorized access, denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, lack of visibility, insecure interfaces/APIs, and so on. Tackling such a wide range of threats requires nimble and mature security strategies that arm the defenders with the capability to gauge threats in a continuously evolving threat landscape while allowing them to calibrate their defensive postures in real-time.
In today’s cloud-first economy, the one-size-fits-all approach is no more practical and efficient. As security teams become more distributed and work through a plethora of specialized security tools to support a broad variety of use cases, organizations need a more collaborative and integrated approach toward security. They must eliminate the siloization of security teams and integrate disparate security functions into their business value chain by leveraging technologies that would enable cross-functional orchestration.
Cyber Innovation through Cyber Fusion
Virtual Cyber Fusion is a next-gen advancement in the cybersecurity technology domain that provides security teams with the flexibility to continuously regulate their security strategies based on the prevailing threat environment. It drives threat visibility through real-time operationalization of strategic and technical threat intelligence while connecting the dots between disparate threat elements to deliver an automated response. With Virtual Cyber Fusion, security teams are not limited in their means and capabilities for effectively responding to any type of threat. As threat actors are continuously innovating and coming up with new and sophisticated attack vectors, Virtual Cyber Fusion grants security teams the latitude to continuously adapt to the predominant threat landscape, thereby laying the foundations for scalable cyber innovation.
Cyber innovation also calls for security teams to reimagine the threat landscape and think out of the box. The recent escalation in the number of high-intensity attacks has necessitated for security teams across organizations to join hands and formulate a collective defense. Given that the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used in a majority of attacks are similar, it’s only prudent for organizations to collaborate through bidirectional threat intelligence sharing to alert each other in real-time of threat actors and share best practices and mitigation strategies and thus stop an attack before it spreads laterally. With a Virtual Cyber Fusion Center (vCFC), organizations can put together a collective defense against threat actors and operationalize the shared threat intelligence.
Furthermore, a vCFC strengthens end-to-end threat management by allowing security teams to leverage security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) technologies to stay ahead of threats impacting them in real-time. The SOAR capabilities of a vCFC enable cross-functional (across IT/DevOps/Security tools) and cross-environmental (across cloud to on-premise) orchestration, thereby streamlining the security response workflows in a holistic manner.
The Bottom Line
The advent of cloud computing presents a variety of opportunities as well as risks for organizations. Threat actors are continually updating their TTPs to target organizations with a distributed technology infrastructure. In face of the mounting cyber threats, it is essential for organizations to fill the gaps in their security postures by leveraging the innovations driving change in cybersecurity operations, including the technologies of Virtual Cyber Fusion, SOAR, and threat intelligence sharing.
While there are unique cybersecurity solutions for different security functions, organizations must focus on breaking the silos and combining them with the help of Virtual Cyber Fusion that can build the next generation of cybersecurity infrastructure. An advanced vCFC combines threat intelligence, incident response, and advanced orchestration and automation capabilities to help security teams detect, respond to, and mitigate different types of threats. By building a vCFC, an organization can make isolated security teams collaborate on a single platform and take a collective defense approach to tackle threats.
–Akshat Jain, Co-Founder and CTO, Cyware
