The cybersecurity technology industry is a crowded space, with new solutions and technologies being introduced every day. It can be overwhelming for chief information security officers (CISOs) to navigate through the sea of options and determine which products or technologies are worth evaluating for their organization’s security weaknesses. This is why it’s important to assess the value that each technology provides, not just whether it can do what it promises to do.
To determine the true value of a security solution, companies should start asking some fundamental questions about these technologies. These questions include proactivity, intelligence, autonomy, scalability, and benefit to the stack as a whole. By answering these questions, companies can evaluate their existing technologies and find the most value in every security technology.
The first question to ask is whether the technology is proactive or reactive. A truly proactive technology is one that sits “left of boom,” or before a successful breach. Most cybersecurity technology today sits “right of boom,” responding to and mitigating the effects of breaches that have already happened. Investing in more proactive technologies can help the rest of the security stack.
The second question to ask is how much cyber intelligence the technology can leverage. The value of intelligence and data has never been higher, and this has proven especially true in the war against cybercriminals. Any cybersecurity technology must be informed by as much cyber/threat intelligence as possible.
The third question to ask is whether the technology is truly autonomous. With a cybersecurity staffing shortage that does not look to be going away any time soon, it’s critical to evaluate what we mean by “autonomous” when thinking about a technology. The technology should require zero hours of an employee’s day on average, not require another full-time employee to manage the alerts or logs, and automatically update.
The fourth question to ask is how the technology scales. Threat actors have shown themselves to be nimble, inventive, and persistent in their attacks. The technologies we implement must be able to grow and adapt to these realities. Knowing your technologies can grow with your network and adapt to an ever-changing threat landscape is vital in any security technology investment.
The fifth and final question to ask is whether the technology can work easily with existing technologies. Multiple technologies that aren’t sharing information can impact a network’s cybersecurity posture. Any new cybersecurity technology should be a benefit to the other technologies or people managing them. It should be able to feed intelligence easily to other implemented technologies, ease a pain point of another technology, or ingest information from other implemented technologies.
By answering these questions, companies can evaluate their existing technologies and find the most value in every security technology. It’s important to break the cycle of slapping new technologies into our security stacks and start making prudent investments. We are moving into a new era of cybersecurity, and every investment must be made with care.