5 Reasons Why You Need 24×7 Cyber Security Monitoring

Continuous or 24x7 cybersecurity monitoring through an experienced security services provider can drastically improve your threat alerts and help you spend more time on your security strategies. Here are five solid reasons you should consider 2x7 cybersecurity monitoring in the year ahead.

In your business culture, it may be deemed desirable that employees be able to work within your networks and remotely using any device they choose, with little regard for method; that employees don't feel constrained by security policy to the point of feeling less productive; that security be maintained while being as unobtrusive as possible. These are all valid and can serve up lively debate within security circles. Regardless of individual positions on topics like this, one thing is constant: It is up to the security leader and practitioner to inform the Executive Leadership team of the risks. Any user awareness program needs to start with executive awareness.

Risks need to be quantified in terms of dollar value. Once put into such business value terms, along with probability metrics that show US companies have 27% chance of incurring a $3.5M breach cost over the next 24 months, executive interest should grow. If your company delas with customer PII, PCI, or PHI data, there are regulatory requirements that proper training is regularly conducted for those who handle that data. With this interest, security begins to become a part of the business culture—this cannot happen without executive interest and support. 

Meet with Executive Leadership at the top and accross all departments in your company. Present them with the current state, calculate the risks, and let them share with you their cultureal viewpoints, as well as who and what they wish the company to be. Reach understandings about what users should be aware of regarding security risks. Devise policy tailored to this.

 

Organizations face a troubling threat landscape like never before. Global cybercrime is predicted to reach more than $2.1 tillion in 2019. You hear about new massive data braches almost monthly. The top enterprise organizations are struggling to keep up with the influx of threats hitting their security teams every day.

Small and mid-size businesses are not exempt either. In fact, SMBs are the next target for cybercriminals as enterprise organizations direct more investment into cybersecurity defenses. Both enterprise and SMBs are facing an onslaught of challenges not to mention a lack of interal resources and a market for skilled cybersecurity professionals to manage everything. Having a security partner that can monitor your environment on a 24x7x7365 basis is where the market is headed. Gartner predicts that security outsourcing will be a major cybersecurity investment category in the years ahead.

 

This year, security leaders are focused on addressing new compliance and regulatory requirements that could cost them millions in fines and penalties for non-compliance. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is among the first and most pressing new global regulation efforts to affect multinational organizations and businesses processing EU subject data. Not to mention, the United States is currently working a new bill called the Data Security and Breach Notification Act. A first-ever Federal regulation that will penalize companies that are hacked.

Nearly every country is now taking consumer data privacy and protection more seriously by introducing new legislation to hold organizations accountable. It becomes critically important that your company takes measures to reduce data compromise and put in the security controls to safeguard consumer data. That's why continuous network and security monitoring from an experienced provider is the preferred choice for many organizations.

 

A team of experts that review security events and logs on a 24x7 basis can help you improve your Mean-Time-to-Detect (MTTD). the average MTTd, according to the 2017 Ponemon Cost of Data Breach Study, for a survey of 491 companies was 191 days with a range of 24 to 546 days. Imagine a hacker within your environment in that time frame. How much damage do you think one hacker, or many, could do during that time? Once a threat actor enters your environment, they can wreak havoc on systems and endpoints and eventually steal your data or hold it for a ransom.

In the same Ponemon report, hackers and criminal insiders were the cause of most data breaches. Companies in the U.S. and Canada also spend the highest amount per record at $224 and $201 per record on resolving a data breach. In the recent Equifax data breach with over 140 million records exposed, the company most likely saw a cost of more than $32 billion to resolve the issue. Not only did the company experience a financial loss because of the breach but also a negative brand and shareholder reputation.

 

The core metric for many security teams to measure their effectiveness is the Mean-Time-Detect and Mean-Time-To-Respond. Once your security team identifies or detects a threat and creates an alert, it becomes a matter of how much time is spent on containing and remediating the threat. The MTTR in the Ponemon Cost of Data Breaches report found that the average for organizations was 66 days with a range of 10 to 164 days.

Some organizations have millions of dollars invested in firewalls, antivirus, endpoint security, and more but these technologies can generate thousands of alerts per day. This can cause your IT or security team to suffer alert fatigue. With 24x7 cybersecurity monitoring, your organization can greatly improve yoru MTTD and MTTR with the right alerts. A team of security analysts at a amanaged security services provider (MSSP) can leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI), automation, and orchestration to improve alerts and identify the events that matter.

 

Data breaches that go on for months are a result of poor detection and response capabilities. Cyber attacks and breaches can happen to anyone which brings the need for around-the-clock awareness of your security environment. If you know exactly what's happening and can sift through the noise of all your devices, you can start to make sense of what's really happening.

Continuous monitoring paired with threat intelligence feeds can take your security detection and response capabilities to the next level. Threat intelligence in conjunction with 24x7 monitoring enables you to know exactly who your threat actors are, how they operate, and how likely they are to hack your organization.

Identifying threats as soon as possible is key in today's threat landscape. As you saw above, threats often go undetected and can result in serious fines or a damaged brand and shareholder reputation. A 24x7 cybersecurity monitoring service helps you overcome significant challenges in your network security. A highly certified security provider can become an extension of your team and help you offload the tedious task of filtering through hundreds and even thousands of alerts.