ESG Whitepaper Reports Need to Shift from Prevention to Rapid Detection and Response to Improve Cyber Security

In a new whitepaper sponsored by Bradford Networks, analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) recommended a new approach to cyber security that focuses on rapid detection and response to help organizations lower risk, improve security, and streamline IT security operations.

According to ESG, after years of settling for "good enough" IT security, enterprise organizations are now realizing that this is no longer an adequate approach. This change of heart can be directly linked to the recent wave of sophisticated malware, targeted attacks, advanced persistent threats (APTs), and visible security breaches. Rather than settling for the required coverage that demonstrates internal and external compliance, business executives are now asking tough questions about cyber security risk and are even willing to throw money at the problem.

According to ESG research, 62 percent of organizations plan to increase their security budgeting in 2014. Additionally, 32 percent of all organizations surveyed consider information security initiatives to be one of their top spending priorities in the coming year.

According to a release, regrettably however, many CISOs continue to take a tactical approach. They are buying products, consolidating tools, and shifting around personnel, yet are failing to deal with the systemic problems associated with threat detection and incident response.

A new ESG whitepaper, Reducing the Critical Time from Incident Detection to Containment, describes an approach for threat detection and continuous response that helps organizations reduce the impact, time and costs of dealing with cyber attacks.

Through this approach, ESG recommends an integrated and correlated architecture that encompasses incident response, security alerts, and endpoint visualization, access, and security (EVAS) to help organizations overcome their current challenges with skills shortages, silos of SOC (security operations center) and NOC (network operations center) information, and complex triage processes.

"In a world of increasingly sophisticated threats, a closed- loop, fully-automated cycle for risk management, incident prevention, detection and response can enable companies to minimize the risk to assets, protect the brand, and streamline IT security operations," said Jon Oltsik, senior principal analyst with ESG. "Bradford Networks can provide an essential piece of this puzzle, helping customers pinpoint compromised systems, and accelerate containment."

"Currently, under-staffed and under-skilled security teams are forced to prioritize security incidents, analyze them through an array of disconnected security systems, and then respond to the most pressing events through a series of manual investigations and operations," said Tom Murphy, CMO at Bradford Networks. "To address these deep-seated flaws in cyber security processes, ESG recommends a new level of integration between threat detection and rapid response technologies to create an end-to-end workflow for data exchange, shared analytics, and granular policy enforcement. Ultimately, this approach will help lower risk, improve incident response time and minimize the impact of cyber threats."

Bradford Networks is a provider of rapid threat response solutions that minimize the risk and impact of cyber threats.

More information:

www.bradfordnetworks.com

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