As enterprises become more “porous” due to shifts like device proliferation, hybrid environments, interconnected systems, and hyperconnected supply chains, they must renew their approach to cybersecurity.
You aren't alone if you've invested heavily in piecemeal cybersecurity solutions and still struggle to protect your data and infrastructure. Many organizations face similar challenges while navigating today’s noisy and chaotic security landscape.
How do you get clarity, capture more business value with your current investment, and stop spinning your wheels?
Start by building a solid foundation with a proactive, holistic cybersecurity strategy based on your business objectives and processes. Then, modernize your approach by consolidating your tools, focusing on business resiliency, unifying your technology ecosystem, and practicing pervasive security. Let’s delve into the details.
1. Vendor and Tool Consolidation
A complex vendor landscape is one of the biggest challenges in enterprise cybersecurity. Too many cooks in the kitchen is the recipe for confusion and oversight. Vendor and tool consolidation is critical for improving security posture and reduce IT spending.
Consolidating vendors and tools allows you to identify interconnected elements and overlapping functions to create synergies and achieve economies of scale. Integration improves visibility into the entire infrastructure while streamlining operations.
Vendor and tool consolidation also helps improve cost efficiency by reducing licensing fees and maintenance costs. You can eliminate duplicate alerts, which may create confusion and impact incident response time. Meanwhile, the reduced complexity makes it easier to identify and address vulnerabilities.
Support Security Consolidation with SASE and XDR
Instead of managing disparate tools, each with its own dashboard and interface, you may consolidate them with a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture or Extended Detect and Response (XDR) platform. 
A SASE architecture consolidates network and security services into a scalable, flexible, cloud-delivered solution. It’s particularly ideal for companies with distributed and remote workforces. It helps simplify management, reduce complexity, and improve integration.
SASE combines various security functionalities, such as secure web gateways (SWG), cloud access security brokers (CASB), firewall as a service (FWaaS), and zero-trust network access (ZTNA), with wide-area networking (WAN) capabilities like software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) and network as a service (NaaS).
XDR is an emerging cybersecurity technology for enhancing threat detection and response capabilities by aggregating and correlating data from disparate security tools across an organization's environment. It provides comprehensive visibility into security incidents, streamlines response processes, and improves security operations' effectiveness.
XDR platforms use advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms to analyze real-time security data. They can identify complex, emerging threats and attack patterns that may slip through individual tools. They also reduce alert fatigue and help your team focus on high-priority tasks.
2. A Focus on Resilience and Recovery
Hoping your infrastructure will never get breached isn’t a good strategy — you won’t get a good night’s sleep. Today’s enterprises must prepare for potential attacks by implementing processes to minimize downtime and disruptions when the unexpected happens. No wonder PWC calls cyber resilience a boardroom priority. 
Cyber resilience is an organization’s ability to withstand and recover from cyberattacks or security incidents. It involves implementing measures and strategies to ensure quick recovery after an incident — minimizing damage and disruption, ensuring continuous operations, and restoring the ability to accomplish business outcomes.
Here are the five essential elements for achieving cyber resilience:
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Identify security risks and gaps with risk assessment and management across all aspects of the organization's infrastructure.
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Implement robust security controls (e.g., endpoint protection, encryption, authentication mechanisms) to protect systems and detect intrusions.
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Conduct incident response planning and tabletop exercises to detail roles, responsibilities, and procedures for responding to cyber incidents.
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Sustain critical organizational operations during an incident by creating a business continuity plan and implementing redundancy measures.
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Facilitate recovery from an incident with a comprehensive backup and recovery plan to minimize downtime and data loss.
Enhancing cyber resilience requires a comprehensive portfolio of tools. No single service can provide a one-size-fits-all solution, and you must design resilience as part of your business processes to achieve the best outcomes.
3. Unifying Enterprise Ecosystems
Cybersecurity isn’t just about IT systems, as technologies and processes become increasingly interconnected. Organizations must also consider their operating technology (OT) and intent of things (IoT) networks to address all potential risks, increase visibility, eliminate blind spots, and minimize vulnerabilities. Your effort should cover these five areas:
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Governance: Establish a unified governance framework, including policies, procedures, guidelines, and cybersecurity management programs. Align them with organizational goals, regulatory requirements, and industry standards.
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Inventory management: Develop a centralized system to provide visibility into all IT, OT, and IoT assets, including devices, applications, and infrastructure components. Also, automate asset discovery for ongoing monitoring and updates.
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Audits and assessments: Standardize audit and assessment methodologies for identifying vulnerabilities, gaps, and compliance issues. Establish tracking and remediation processes to ensure timely resolution of audit findings.
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Secure network architecture implementation: Implement a unified network architecture. Adopt best practices like zero-trust principles, least privilege access controls, and network segmentation supported by robust authentication, encryption, and monitoring mechanisms.
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Obsolescence management: Implement strategies to address end-of-life (EOL) and end-of-support (EOS) issues for IT, OT, and IoT assets and systems. Maintain an inventory of legacy and obsolete technologies and assess their impact on business operations and security.
4. Pervasive Security
Pervasive security is a holistic approach that integrates cybersecurity measures across all layers of an organization's infrastructure, applications, data, and processes, embedding security into every aspect of an enterprise’s operations. It covers these key areas:
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Security and recovery: Combine multiple layers of security controls and invest in security automation and orchestration tools to strengthen threat detection, response, and recovery processes for efficient incident detection and resolution.
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Asset management: Establish a centralized asset inventory and management system to enforce policies and track, maintain, and protect all hardware and software assets across the organization's infrastructure.
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Hardware refresh: Develop a hardware-refresh strategy to address security vulnerabilities, performance requirements, and compatibility with emerging technologies. For example, you may require a hardware refresh to support Windows 11’s latest security features.
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Workload management: Implement containerization and microservices architectures to isolate workloads and minimize the impact of security breaches. Use cloud-native security controls and services, such as identity and access management (IAM), encryption, and network segmentation, to protect workloads in cloud environments.
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AI and data analytics: Implement data classification, encryption, and access control to protect sensitive data at rest, in transit, and in use. Develop data governance frameworks to define data ownership, access privileges, and privacy requirements.
Additionally, incorporate regular assessments into your strategy to address new risks as your infrastructure evolves.
Security by Design: A Cybersecurity Strategy Built For Your Business Requirements
Architecting your network and implementing a secure environment requires deliberate considerations. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, nor is this a one-and-done project. Enterprises need a proactive, holistic security strategy designed around their business requirements to modernize their defense while achieving their business objectives.
That’s what we do at Compugen. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, we take the time to understand how everything connects in your organization and how your employees experience technology to help them do what they do best.
We address your business priorities and key strategic initiatives to inform our security analysis, assessments, and mitigation strategy. We’re here for the long haul by providing a multi-year and multi-dimensional approach to support your core business activities.
Learn more about our comprehensive cybersecurity services and get in touch to modernize your defense.
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