How CISOs can use security data lakes to drive accountability
In today’s digital age, data is the new oil. It is the lifeblood of businesses and organizations, and its protection is paramount. Cybersecurity threats are rising, and CISOs are under immense pressure to ensure their organization’s security posture is robust. Security data lakes are emerging as a powerful tool that can help CISOs and other security leaders drive accountability.
What are security data lakes?
Security data lakes are an architecture that lets security leaders consolidate security data regardless of quantity and variety, making it possible to drive real accountability across their organization. Security data lakes help achieve this in two ways:
Separate storage from computing, which makes it cost-effective to store security data at scale and for longer periods.
Make security data part of a company’s general-purpose analytics platform, which allows for additional context and delivering insights via standard reporting tools.
How can CISOs use security data lakes to drive accountability?
CISOs employing security data lakes should think about accountability, a powerful way to improve their overall security posture. Here are three examples of how security data lakes help CISOs and other security leaders drive accountability:
Evaluate vendors with cold, hard data
Most companies select and evaluate security vendors based on simple criteria, like whether they support certain data sources and applications. A lack of information keeps decision-makers from evaluating vendors on more meaningful factors like threat detection performance or vulnerability prioritization accuracy.
Security data lakes let teams identify gaps between the insights vendors provide and what an organization actually experiences. Analyzing data from a ticketing system, for instance, lets the team see how many threats detected by a vendor were false positives or how many vulnerability findings are irrelevant.
A security product may work great in one company’s environment but less well at another firm. If the team can measure performance across the metrics that matter to the company, it can work with the vendor to help them improve — or determine that the company needs a better tool.
Illuminate flawed processes
If remediation teams don’t address vulnerabilities quickly enough on a consistent basis, access to historical data helps uncover those problems and identify processes that may need updating to help them work more effectively.
Identify the root cause of incidents
Security data lakes can hold teams more accountable by consolidating security data regardless of quantity and variety, making it possible to drive real accountability across an organization.
By analyzing historical incident response data, teams can identify patterns in attack vectors or vulnerabilities that led to incidents. This information can be used to improve incident response processes or identify areas where additional training is needed.