Driving in fog can be extremely dangerous. The reason is obvious: Fog obscures the road ahead of you, leaving the driver of the vehicle unable to see any unexpected obstacles or turns promptly. Moreover, depending on the denseness of the fog, they might not spot them until it’s too late to respond. Therefore, Security Visibility is Crucial for Incident Response.
Cybersecurity can be similar. Visibility — meaning the ability to spot threats in the environment in an actionable way — is essential. Effective logging practices grant organizations the ability to better understand, trace, and, most importantly, react to security events involving their systems.
Logs refer to the files that keep track of actions involving computer systems or applications. Think of them as the cybersecurity version of a flight recorder on an aeroplane.
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However, there may be a dearth of usable logs in far too many cases, thereby leaving organizations blind to cyber attacks. Furthermore, because logs only truly become indispensable when an incident requires them, these organizations may not realize what they’re missing until an attack occurs.
To return to the analogy of driving in adverse weather conditions, that’s like not realizing your fog lights don’t work until you’ve had a crash — because you didn’t bother to test them. It’s here that tools like SASE can help.
A lack of usable logs
In some ways, a lack of logs can prove even more befuddling than the car example. If a car hits a barricade in fog, it’s pretty easy to work out what’s happened after the fact. But a cyber-attack — which can cause enormous damage to victims — might leave targets none the wiser if they do not have proper logs in place.
Forensic analysts combing through the attack details to figure out what went wrong may be unable to carry out a full, in-depth analysis if the correct information has not been stored or, sometimes, even gathered in the first place. That doesn’t just mean not being able to figure out what happened on that occasion — it means being unable to safeguard against similar attacks in the future.
On the other hand, if proper visibility as possible, cybersecurity experts wouldn’t just be able to reconstruct the steps involved in an attack and plug the holes; they may respond more rapidly to an attack that’s in progress.
Failure to employ the right strategies
There may be multiple reasons for organizations not implementing a proper strategy when it comes to logging. For instance, they may opt for (possibly default) options in their software that overwrites information continuously: saving on storage but not doing any favours to your data hygiene or compliance. They may also lack a centralized logging system that makes it difficult to easily draw on this information where required. Yet another problem can involve management logs for privileged accounts that log the actions of administrators and others with privileged access.
When it comes to providing the right security visibility, SASE can help. Pronounced “sassy,” SASE is short for Secure Access Service Edge. It’s a form of next-gen network architecture uniting security functionality with WAN capabilities perfect for the modern world of remote work and access. SASE combines cloud-native and global SD-WAN architecture with impressive security features that include zero-trust network access (ZTNA), firewall as a service (FWaaS), secure web gateway (SWG), and more. In short, SASE promises scalable, high-end security that doesn’t have any kind of detrimental impact on performance in doing so.
SASE brings the visibility
One of the big advantages of SASE is its visibility. Traditional legacy systems resulted in a lack of visibility and fragmented control that could slow troubleshooting and increase security exposure. With SASE, meanwhile, the architecture enables complete visibility of all traffic flowing through SASE Points of Presence (PoPs). This not only maximizes the visibility of network traffic but also the visibility of all important security events.
SASE is a game-changer in all sorts of ways. Visibility, however, is a big one that cannot be underrated. SASE enables security and networking professionals to gain the benefit of greater visibility, combined with the real-time information they can then use to take action about network activity, traffic, and data. Furthermore, all of this is made possible while simultaneously simplifying the security stack. From a security perspective, SASE can greatly help speed up incident detection, investigation, and response.
Security visibility is one of the most important weapons a cybersecurity team can have in their arsenal. Unfortunately, cyberattacks aren’t going to go away any time soon. In fact, they’re ramping up all the time. As a result, teams need to have the right tools in place to help defend against them. There are few better defences you can have on your side than SASE.
