SecOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver security and services at high velocity. It is a collaborative effort between IT security and operations teams to meet the collective goals of evolving and improving an organization’s security posture at a faster pace.
In a SecOps approach, they share accountability for the priorities included in maintaining the productive state and security of their enterprise’s environment. With this proactive joint effort, there is greater visibility into security vulnerabilities throughout the organization and shared valuable information that can help resolve security issues quickly while keeping IT operations agile and fully functioning.
Essentials of an Enterprise SecOps.
- It’s an Integrated model
An integrated model in which security and operations teams ensure that the philosophy of security is built into every layer of the organization and the outcome of this is an organization that operates faster and with a greater measure of security. This brings increased Transparency where the three components of SecOps (development, security, and operations) are closely tied together with increased collaboration and greater transparency.
- Security is a Process, Not a Product
Did you know that the most common type of security incident is the disclosure of sensitive or confidential information? Approximately 80% of those data disclosure incidents are caused, either on accident or on purpose, by internal staff. Put simply, the greatest risk to security, but also the greatest asset, is not technology. It’s the people. It’s an unwinnable situation because throwing technology at a problem that is fundamentally not a technology problem, to begin with, will not yield (the right kind of) results. Ultimately the integrity and security of your technical environment will reflect the maturity of the people and processes that manage it, not the other way around.
- Automation helps!
When organizations reach a level of security maturity, they will have a step-by-step process to handle 20% of security problems that consume 80% of their time. Automating the low hanging fruit by selecting the right platform allows your incident responders to focus on truly critical issues. This also partially addresses a problem - a large shortage of cybersecurity professionals.
- Capture Knowledge & Investigate in Seconds
Threat intelligence is a security process with two basic steps: gaining knowledge and understanding of possible security threats to the organization and establishing methods to detect and respond to those threats. Threat intelligence can be conducted as a collaborative effort and by leveraging threat intelligence integrations, you limit the unknowns to more accurately test evolving hypotheses, establish defense mechanisms, react to ongoing breaches, and transform insight into automated actions.
Remediation and recovery plans are only as effective as the accuracy and immediacy of the insight underpinning those decisions. SOC analysts must be more agile and creative to quickly pivot, filter, and instantly analyze streaming and historical data with all hot, live data; enrich data with contextual intelligence, and compare results against industry frameworks for threat profiling and mapping.
- Simplify Compliance
Compliance has traditionally been a taxing endeavor to businesses, but it can be as simple as running a report. When you have solid processes, better auditing Procedures and your automation tools are doing large portions of the documentation, compliance burdens all but melt away. In Agile and other development methods, security checks would occur toward the end of the development process. SecOps provides for more thoughtful, smoother evaluations.
