In today’s digital landscape, organizations have to deal with an increasing number of security threats and compliance requirements, which are often managed by a variety of security tools and technologies. This complexity often leads to security policies that are difficult to manage, enforce, and track, resulting in security gaps and increased risk of data breaches. In fact, 76% of CIOs and CISOs state that their top cybersecurity challenges are hybrid IT or cyber hygiene.
Adopting a holistic view of an entire organization’s security posture can feel impossible in such a complex environment, but a solution does exist. If you’re struggling to maintain your organization’s cybersecurity, it might be time to get a better conductor for your orchestra.
What is Cybersecurity Policy Orchestration?
Cybersecurity Policy Orchestration provides a centralized platform to manage security policies across multiple security tools and technologies, regardless of their location.
What are the Most Common Policy Orchestration Use Cases?
Setting up policy orchestration enables organizations to streamline security policy management, enforce policies consistently, and reduce the risk of security breaches. These systems help address a number of challenges:
- Maintaining up-to-date security policies across disparate hardware and software systems
- Improving the implementation speed of security changes throughout the organization
- Providing real-time visibility into policy compliance
- Alerting the organization to security risks
- Streamlining rollout for new applications, resources and business processes
An ideal orchestration system provides a high-level of operational automation to manage daily tasks like policy updates or compliance reporting, freeing your staff to focus on more strategic work like threat analysis.
How are Security Policy Orchestration Systems Chosen?
A number of companies offer policy orchestration platforms. Atlantic Data Security’s experience has shown, however, that no one tool is a perfect fit for every company.
Most orchestration platforms will require some level of customization during implementation, and you should base your platform decision on the following criteria:
- Integration with and support for your existing security solutions
- Available reporting and summarization tools
- Scalability
- Security update deployment processes
- Support levels offered
- Levels of automation available
- Price
When shopping for these platforms, you should spend significant time in a trial version to ensure that it meets your needs.
What is the Ideal Policy Orchestration Implementation?
Policy orchestration system implementations will benefit from two additions beyond the software itself: 24/7 monitoring, and manufacturer liaisons. For this reason, we typically recommend a managed security orchestration arrangement.
24/7 Monitoring
While policy orchestration systems’ automated capabilities can be quite impressive, we would never recommend letting the system run without human oversight. This means that you’ll need someone monitoring your orchestration system 24/7, which can be difficult to staff internally.
Manufacturer Liaisons
The second area where managed security orchestration really shines is with dedicated manufacturer support. When challenges occur with a piece of equipment or software, response time improves significantly when handed over to an expert in that tool for resolution. At Atlantic Data Security, we maintain manufacturer certificates so that our clients don’t have to. There’s no worse feeling than having to become an instant expert in a tool during a security incident, and manufacturer support liaisons solve that issue.
We hope this post has given you a good overview of security policy orchestration systems and how managed security orchestration can support your organization. For more information, register for our Atlantic Data Security policy orchestration webinar, and you can also contact our cybersecurity experts.