The Case for Comprehensive Cyber Situational Awareness

The sophistication of cyber-attacks is making security an increasing challenge for businesses. The cybersecurity threat landscape is constantly evolving. The concept of “perimeter security” in a BYOD, IoT and work from anywhere world is all but gone. Understanding your environment, accurately predicting and responding to potential problems that might occur has become essential to protecting mission critical systems. Meaningful cyber situational awareness allows today’s business leaders to safeguard sensitive data, business, and supply chain operations. By predicting what might happen to these systems, leaders can develop effective countermeasures to protect their critical missions. Good awareness starts with visibility. You cannot protect it if you do not know what you have, how it's configured, and where it is in its lifecycle. But we can’t stop there. Security teams also need to understand: What does the threat landscape look like? Where are they vulnerable? What are the likely threats and vulnerabilities your business needs to mitigate? What’s the highest risk to your business? What are the business impacts and consequences should an attack occur? What can you do to remediate and mitigate risk? With the right awareness, threats and potentially negative events can be identified and managed as they occur.