Written by:
Purandar Das Cybersecurity has only gotten harder in the last few years with pushes for remote work and increased cloud infrastructure integration. This has vastly increased the attack surface for organizations and made it more challenging for security teams to keep up. Businesses have in the past deployed multiple point data security solutions that focus on combating specific threats with detection and mitigation rather than taking a preventative approach. While effective for what they do at the individual level, they increase management workload for teams and operational costs.
Security teams struggle to keep up with the demand leading to almost half working over 40 hours a week and being kept up at night worried about stress from the job and work challenges. This can lead to worker burnout, with team members leaving for less stressful positions. Unfortunately, with a cybersecurity skills shortage estimated to be 2.7 million professionals, it is not easy to re-hire these roles.
Organizations are not without recourse. They are shifting their approach to a consolidated architecture that uses tools providing multiple functionalities rather than numerous point solutions to simplify operations. Consolidated architecture streamlines operations to improve security, enhance operational efficiency, and reduce overhead to save on budgets.
Complexity Impedes Operations
Too many point data security solutions implemented to meet security needs lead to solution creep. While these solutions meet the immediate requirements of stopping a threat, they add complexity to the organization and diminish the ability to gather meaningful analytics. Each solution requires management and oversight to remain effective, which burdens the security workforce. This problem grows as more point solutions are implemented to meet emerging security challenges.
Labor Strapped Market
Managing individual solutions is no small task. Each point solution can include user management, access configuration, and monitoring tasks. This does not even account for the additional time required for staff to learn the ins and outs of operating each solution.
The different management tasks and learning new systems take time away from staff to do more meaningful work and add stress that contributes to burnout.
Businesses cannot simply add more staff to manage the situation when there is a lack of qualified staff to hire. With the cybersecurity skills shortage it’s no longer as easy as posting an ad to find new employees. This leaves organizations in a quandary where keeping everything running smoothly prevents teams from tackling more significant problems that can improve the organization long term.
Drawing Connections
As more solutions are integrated into the IT ecosystem, gathering meaningful analytics and identifying possible threats becomes more challenging. Valuable data is spread out over multiple locations and solutions, making it challenging for team members to divide their time out effectively. So even if the correct information is being collected, it may not be identified promptly and acted upon in a timely manner.
Even for organizations with the staff to divide and monitor everything, having data in separate repositories makes it challenging to define and gather meaningful metrics. Data is reviewed only in the context of the collecting system. Data that might appear slightly off on its own from this view may be a sign of something more significant when combined with data from other sources. Without seeing the whole picture, it is easy to overlook details that appear benign from one angle but are an obvious indicator of attack when taken in the context of other data points.
Increased Risk
The problem goes far beyond employee time management, however. Every additional solution created also adds a location where data will reside. This increases the overall attack surface of your organization.
As more data security solutions are implemented, the organizational architecture becomes more complex. Recent studies have found that 53% of those surveyed have attributed misconfigurations to the complexity of their infrastructure. This creates a direct correlation between security and complexity, with misconfigurations being the cause of 80% of data breaches in the cloud.
Optimizing Solutions for Success
Fortunately, there is a way to help reduce the risk and complexity of too many point data security solutions in your organization. It uses tools that consolidate multiple functionalities into a platform rather than a one-off solution. These tools help simplify the administration and monitoring that your organization needs to do. Decreasing the number of solutions lowers the learning curve for new staff, allowing them to quickly and more efficiently onboard.
This does not mean that you need to eliminate all of your existing and working solutions to trade-off for a multi-functional platform. Instead, it means that as solutions near the end of their lifecycle or new data security needs must be met, these solutions can help declutter your infrastructure. In the best-case scenario, you will identify solutions that not only provide multiple capabilities but also integrate directly into your existing infrastructure and help centralize your management and operations.
Single Source of Truth
One of the primary advantages of having tools that offer multiple functionalities, especially integrating with other solutions, is the amalgamation of information. By combining different data streams, analysts can generate more in-depth insights. Correlated information has more meaning when viewed in the context of other data. This allows organizations to determine when attacks might happen and eliminate potential positives and false negatives.
Also, by gathering more information in one area, staff does not need to hunt around in multiple interfaces and locations to conduct effective monitoring. This reduces the time wasted jumping between different systems and reduces the overall workload for teams. When staffing shortages are already an issue, decreasing their workload and making operations more efficient decreases their stress, leading to burnout. It also allows them to spend more time on more meaningful work than administrative tasks.
Building on Existing Success
Optimizing your operations with consolidated data security solutions is not something that happens overnight nor does it require throwing out all of your existing infrastructure. There are natural periods when upgrading or adding new functionality makes sense. When tools approach the end of their practical life or visible capability gaps, finding new solutions makes sense.
Implementing multi-functional solutions is not about throwing out working solutions and replacing them with broader tools. Instead, it is about finding solutions that build upon what is already in place while also delivering better capabilities. Data security tools that can integrate with existing solutions and centralize management or monitoring through a single interface are the most effective choices in this area.
Finding a Multi-Purpose Platform
Sotero is more than simply an encryption solution. It is a complete data privacy and protection solution that integrates access management and privacy capabilities to deliver data security, change management, and access control under one umbrella. Sotero allows you to cut costs by minimizing the existing sprawl of security products by allowing you to manage your data security ecosystem through a single-pane-of-glass. Intelligent automation guarantees that new assets and applications added to the security fabric inherit security capabilities, reducing the load on your staff and simplifying operational overhead.
Schedule a demo today to learn more about how the Sotero Data Security Platform can help you make the most of your existing IT security workforce.