A cybersecurity platform provides a unified interface from which to manage multiple security tools and controls. Traditionally, these platforms only work within a single vendor’s ecosystem of products. However, a new type of solution, called Cybersecurity-as-a-Platform (or CaaP), allows you to integrate your choice of third-party, multi-vendor solutions. In this blog, we’ll discuss the challenge of managing a complex cybersecurity environment and explain how CaaP can help.
Why Cybersecurity-a-a-Platform (CaaP) is the future of holistic security
Modern network security is rapidly evolving and expanding to deal with the increasing sophistication and frequency of cyberattacks. According to the Oracle and KPMG Cloud Threat Report from 2020, the average organization uses over 100 discrete cybersecurity controls. Often these tools come from many different vendors and perform many different functions, requiring specialized training to use each one effectively. This creates a highly complex cybersecurity environment that’s prone to human error.
In addition, there’s a lack of interoperability between products, meaning tools are often disjointed and working independently of each other rather than as a cohesive system. There’s also no centralized control or visibility over these independent solutions, which means administrators need to log in to each one to configure, monitor, and manage their functionality.
This leaves teams without a big-picture overview of their cybersecurity environment, making it impossible to achieve a complete security posture. This need for centralized management and monitoring of discrete security products led to the development of unified cybersecurity platforms.
What is a cybersecurity platform?
A cybersecurity platform is a software solution—typically, but not always, cloud-based—which unifies an ecosystem of security tools and controls behind one management interface. In the past, this has usually been vendor-specific (e.g., Trend Micro providing a single platform from which to manage their own security products). However, this type of platform leaves you locked in to whatever features and functionality are included by the cybersecurity vendor, or their chosen integration partners.
That leaves organizations with one of two choices:
1. Stay within that ecosystem and accept that they may have gaps in their coverage due to a lack of needed functionality. In this case, this means sacrificing the security of their network and systems for the convenience of using a single management system.
2. Add on additional products that must be managed outside of that platform, creating more management complexity for security administrators. In this case, this means sacrificing efficiency and interoperability in the hopes of improving overall security.
In either scenario, the organization is hurting its security posture by making compromises. A better solution is to choose a platform that gives you the freedom to combine the best security products and tools for your unique environment under one convenient management umbrella.
What is Cybersecurity-as-a-Platform (CaaP)?
Cybersecurity-as-a-Platform (CaaP) provides a vendor-agnostic interface from which to control a vast and complicated cybersecurity ecosystem. CaaP doesn’t care who you bought your security tools from or how you plan to use them—it provides the platform from which to integrate, manage, and monitor every component of your cybersecurity toolkit. This includes creating unified dashboards and visualizations that combine data from all your different security monitoring and analytics solutions, so you can get a complete picture of your cybersecurity environment.
How CaaP enables holistic cybersecurity
A unified Cybersecurity-as-a-Platform solution benefits businesses by:
→ Reducing data overload – Security analysts must monitor and act on data from a wide variety of sources, including intrusion detection systems (IDS), firewalls, and security information and event management (SIEM) solutions. With so much data to sort through to filter out the false positives from the real threats, analysts can easily become overwhelmed and allow issues to fall through the cracks.
CaaP unifies the data from these individual sources and gives teams a single dashboard from which to view and analyze events. Plus, CaaP supports integrations with tools that can automatically analyze, filter, and remediate security incidents, reducing the risk of human error and freeing up security teams to work on high-priority issues.
→ Simplifying security management – It’s very difficult (if not impossible) for a single security analyst to become an expert in 100+ different products, each of which has its own interface, nomenclature, compatibility issues, etc. Plus, simply logging into every one of these tools on a regular basis takes a significant amount of time, making it far too easy for analysts to neglect or forget critical security systems.
With the right Cybersecurity-as-a-Platform, analysts can integrate all their security tools into one common platform, reducing the number of discrete solutions they need to learn, maintain, and support. This both reduces the risk of human error and reduces the workload on overwhelmed security teams.
→ Improving security posture – The more complex a system is, the more prone it is to failure. A cybersecurity strategy that relies on the continued operation and effectiveness of over 100 individual moving parts is more likely to fail because an issue with even one of those tools could lead to a breach. Plus, without a centralized view of how these parts work together, there’s no way to get a complete picture of an organization’s security posture.
CaaP gives analysts the ability to monitor and maintain all their security tools in one place, so they can see alerts about new vulnerabilities, apply patches, and more. They can also ensure all these tools are working together as expected so there are no gaps in coverage, and see data and visualizations about the security of the organization as a whole.
Adopt the CaaP approach to security with ZPE Systems
Cybersecurity-as-a-Platform is a unified, tightly integrated solution that rolls up a vast ecosystem of security tools behind one pane of glass. CaaP is the future of holistic security because it empowers efficient security monitoring and management while providing a complete overview of an organization’s security posture. True CaaP, like the Nodegrid solution from ZPE Systems, is completely vendor-neutral. This gives you the freedom to bring in your choice of cybersecurity solutions and automation tools, so you get the best features, functionality, and performance for your unique environment.
Want to learn more about cybersecurity platforms with Nodegrid?
Contact ZPE Systems today!