Introduction: The CISO’s Dilemma
In today’s fast-paced digital world, the role of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is more crucial than ever. CISOs must manage a challenging balancing act: ensuring robust and reliable cybersecurity measures while keeping business productivity in full swing. How do effective CISOs balance security and productivity? We’ve gathered some thoughts and case studies to gain insight into this question.
Join us as we explore this challenge to shed light on how to balance security and productivity.
The Modern CISO Challenge
In 2017, Bromium commissioned a study surveying 500 CISOs from companies with 1000+ employees across the USA, UK, and Germany. Their findings, published in a report titled “The CISO’s Dilemma: Security Versus Productivity,” revealed:
- 74% of CISOs report that employees experience frustration due to the perception that security policies hamper productivity.
- 77% of CISOs surveyed “feel stuck trying to keep the organization secure while enabling innovation.”
- 81% of CISOs “believe employees see security as a barrier to innovation.”
These statistics underscore the CISO challenge: navigating the treacherous waters between tightening security measures—potentially causing operational slowdowns—and ensuring fluid business operations, each with its inherent risks.
Microsoft’s Solutions to the CISO Challenge
Microsoft offers a suite of tools designed to help organizations strike the right balance between security and productivity. Let’s delve deeper into two of these tools: Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender for Cloud.
Microsoft Sentinel
Purpose
Microsoft Sentinel is a scalable, cloud-native, security information event management (SIEM) and security orchestration automated response (SOAR) solution. It provides intelligent security analytics and threat intelligence across the enterprise, offering a single solution for alert detection, threat visibility, proactive hunting, and threat response.
Key Features
- Collect Data Across Your Enterprise: Sentinel allows you to collect data at scale from users, devices, applications, and infrastructure, both on-premises and in multiple clouds.
- Detect Previously Unfound Threats: With the help of Microsoft’s analytics and threat intelligence, Sentinel can detect threats that might otherwise go unnoticed.
- Investigate Threats with AI: Augment your analysts’ capabilities with AI.
- Automate Common Tasks: Set up automated threat responses to known threats, which can save time and effort.
- Integration: Sentinel integrates with popular solutions, including Palo Alto Networks, F5, Symantec, Fortinet, and Check Point.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Purpose
Microsoft Defender for Cloud helps prevent, detect, and respond to threats with increased visibility into and control over the security of your resources. It offers integrated security monitoring and policy management across your subscriptions.
Key Features
- Broad Monitoring: Defender for Cloud monitors a wide range of Azure resources, including virtual machines, virtual machine scale sets, and many Azure PaaS services. It also extends its protection to on-premises resources and multicloud resources, including Amazon AWS and Google Cloud.
- Visibility: The Defender for Cloud Overview page displays the overall security posture of your environment, broken down by Compute, Networking, Storage & data, and Applications.
- Security Initiatives: A security initiative defines the set of controls (policies) recommended for resources within a specific subscription.
- Security Recommendations: Defender for Cloud analyzes the security state of your resources and provides recommendations when potential vulnerabilities are identified.
- Security Alerts: When threats are detected, a security alert is created.
AccountabilIT Can Help
In the ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity, maintaining a robust and proactive security posture is paramount. At AccountabilIT, we pride ourselves on being one of Microsoft’s most experienced and tenured managed service providers, offering a comprehensive managed security solution that seamlessly integrates with Microsoft’s security tools.
Leveraging Microsoft Sentinel
We empower organizations to start using Microsoft Sentinel immediately. Our solution ensures that the deployment scales automatically to meet organizational needs, ensuring cost-effectiveness by only charging for the resources utilized. With our expertise, organizations can deploy their first instance of Sentinel tailored to their unique requirements, all within the Microsoft Azure ecosystem.
Keep Your Existing Tools
This cloud-native SIEM experience integrates with existing tools, whether they are business applications, other security products, or custom tools. Our solution also allows organizations to bring their own insights, tailored detections, machine learning models, and threat intelligence, ensuring a customized and optimized security experience.
Integration with Microsoft Defender for Cloud
While the details from the provided link didn’t specifically mention Microsoft Defender for Cloud, it’s logical to assume that our managed solution would integrate with it, given our focus on Microsoft’s security tools. This provides a holistic security approach, covering both SIEM and endpoint security.
24/7 In-House SOC
One of the standout features of our managed solution is our 24×7 US-based Security Operations Center (SOC). Once Microsoft Sentinel is deployed and connected, our SOC takes over, providing continuous monitoring and alerting. This ensures that threats are detected and addressed in real-time, offering organizations peace of mind. Our SOC manages and watches as a managed service round the clock, allowing businesses to focus on growth and operations, confident in the knowledge that their security is in expert hands.
Offer Highlights
- Deployment of Microsoft Sentinel, Log Analytics, Logic Apps, and Automation.
- Configuration and testing of all applicable Microsoft Sentinel data connectors.
- Entity configuration mapping for optimal Sentinel investigations.
- Microsoft Sentinel data collection review and tuning, including rule templates.
- Formal engineering review of dashboards and incident triggers.
- 24×7 Security Operations Center monitoring and alerting.
With AccountabilIT’s managed security solution, organizations can be assured of a comprehensive, proactive, and expert-managed security posture, leveraging the best of Microsoft’s security tools.
