The single biggest threat that exists in the present digital age, I think, is cyber. Yes, enterprises today are continuously defeated in their efforts of maintaining a perfect set of security policies. The antivirus software, IDS/IPS and firewalls, all are taken aback. The present environment is flooded with advanced and targeted attacks. A study has revealed 50% of U.S. organisations have experienced a ransomware attack in 2016 and a whopping 85% have faced three or more in the same year. Neil MacDonald, VP and fellow at Gartner is also of the opinion that “We can’t control everything (in the network) anymore.” The next generation is very service-oriented, virtualized, contextual, adaptive, and model-driven and so does the security needs to be, further added by him.
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An attack on a business means a risk to its long-built reputation and most valuable data. Businesses are under constant pressure to deal with these ongoing attacks. The IT personnel are spending an inordinate amount of time, money and energy in blocking and battling these attacks, leaving behind insufficient resources to prepare for any future attacks. The information security architecture is failing again and again and so does the businesses and their growth. Businesses now genuinely need a new and effective security model.
An adaptive security concept seems to be an answer for these businesses. It is a real-time network security model which scrutinises and identifies a network for malicious traffic, vulnerabilities or anomalies in real-time and automatically implements endpoint security. Its pillars of competence are:
Preventive capabilities help businesses to put together all the precautionary policies, products, and processes in order to counter the attacks.
Detective capabilities detect the attacks that bypass the preventive layer. It reduces the time taken for detecting the threat and thus prevents potential damages from becoming actual damages.
Retrospective capabilities find issues which even surpassed the detective layer also. It finds the issue, analyse it and presents new preventive measures to avoid future accidents.
Predictive capabilities monitor all the activities and proactively anticipate new types of attacks that can take place. It keeps the security team on alert by providing them with the information beforehand.
The concept offers a better level of control. It allows you to adapt to network and computing changes and exploit better monitoring abilities through the use of smart dashboards.
As soon as new and unusual behaviour is noticed in the network, an alert is sent to the concerned security for him to respond. Rather, the software itself blocks such behaviour while still enabling human interventions.
Another biggest benefit that it has provided businesses is the intelligence to anticipate how and when an attack might occur. IT leaders now have the ability to identify these threats beforehand and build their armies for them.
Further, the Adaptive security approach really helps businesses to understand their strengths and weaknesses and once aware of it, your secessions to choose the right ways to mitigate risk really becomes sensible.
Thus, this loop of security is simple, interesting and effective. It shrinks the attack surface, reduces attack velocity, decreases remediation time, promotes the security and reliability of the processing system and most importantly takes your data protection to a whole new level.
