ExtraHop Presentation: Defense in Diversification: Improving cybersecurity through smart consolidation
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Presented at CyberSecuritySummitSeattle 2019 by
Ask any analyst, reporter, or financial observer, and they’ll tell you that the security market is ripe for consolidation. For years, security vendors have proliferated, buoyed by high valuations and ever-expanding enterprise security budgets. While this rush to innovate has resulted in better and more sophisticated threat defenses, it has also created a complex web of tools which already overworked, overwhelmed, and understaffed security teams must manage. This tool sprawl is one reason that so many in and around the security industry believe that an era of consolidation is coming. According to ESG Research, 66 percent of businesses are actively working to consolidate their security portfolio. For many in the security industry, a security platform that essentially puts your “SOC-in-a-box” is an ideal solution to the tool sprawl problem. But this approach is not without peril. If the security industry consolidates to the point that there are just a few platform solutions, this will not only stifle innovation, it will result in a monoculture – and monocultures are notoriously susceptible to disease. If every organization uses an identical or nearly identical set of security tools, breaking into one means breaking into them all. And once threat actors figure out how to break in once, they’ll have the keys to every organization. Just like the world banana population – itself a monoculture – is currently being wiped out by a fungus to which is has no natural resistance, a single cyber threat could take down a vast number of organizations. In the case of cybersecurity, heterogeneity of defense systems is itself a defense, so security teams need to approach consolidation differently. In this session, attendees will learn: – How a data-first approach to security architectures can illuminate natural consolidation points – How collaboration with other parts of the IT organization can actually improve security posture and reduce tool sprawl. – How this collaborative approach also creates opportunity to leverage other parts of the organization to improve security posture through smarter processes and practices.