You Can’t Protect What You Can’t See: Improving Cybersecurity with Monitoring Solutions

When a data breach hits the headlines, questions often arise for those not familiar with cybersecurity. How did the organization not realize what was going on? Why did they ignore all the warning signs? Those more familiar with just how massive IT infrastructures can be understand that the issue is not a matter of ignoring warning signs, it’s an inability to see them at all. Security monitoring solutions like a SIEM can provide valuable insights and prioritize alerts, distinguishing between those that could lead to thwarting a devastating breach, and those that are harmless incidents. Read on to find out how threat escalation, centralization, diverse integrations, and network monitoring can help clear the line of sight.

A Centralized Hub for Security Monitoring

A SIEM solution can consolidate any number of data streams, becoming your organization’s primary security monitoring tool. A solution like Event Manager provides a centralized hub with useful dashboards and information, ensuring that analysts don’t miss anything simply because they were looking at another screen. With 68% of those surveyed in the 2019 SIEM Report by Cybersecurity Insiders confirming that they used SIEM for monitoring, correlating, and analyzing activity across multiple systems and applications, it’s clear that SIEM solutions are a successful way to provide new insights with the added context of seeing security data pulled from a variety of systems.

Monitoring Datastreams without Exception

Unique or non-standard data sources can become a blind spot for organizations. Not all monitoring tools have the capability to support unusual assets like a homegrown database or third-party applications. If nearly all of your datastreams are being monitored, it’s easy to let the few applications that aren’t slip the cracks. Organizations should perform a thorough audit of the types of assets they have before choosing a monitoring tool. SIEM solutions like Event Manager can be tailored to integrate any type of datastream.

Automatically Discover New Devices with Network Monitoring Tools

Another potential blind spot that threat actors can take advantage of is the onboarding of new data sources. New assets are typically set up by members of IT staff outside of the security team. There is often a long delay between when a new device or application is deployed and when it is integrated into a security monitoring tool.

Network monitoring solutions like Intermapper create a network map, showing exactly what's happening on an organization’s network. Intermapper continuously monitors for performance issues, outages, bandwidth, and any other changes in the network, including the appearance of new devices. By integrating a solution like Intermapper into a SIEM like Event Manager, security analysts will immediately become aware of the presence of a new datasource that needs to be monitored for security events, ensuring that there isn’t a long absence of coverage that would allow for malicious activity to occur unnoticed.

Organizations have a portfolio of solutions dedicated to making sure their IT environment runs as smoothly as possible. Though these tools often work in isolation, solutions that can work together are truly powerful. Intermapper and Event Manager are a perfect example of how two solutions can collaborate to make an even safer security posture. Such tools are straightforward to deploy, intuitive to use, and also work for organizations with any budget, as free versions of both Event Manager and Intermapper are both available.

Ultimately, visibility into your IT infrastructure doesn’t merely come down to having all the raw data. This data must be filtered, given context, and prioritized in order for it to become useful information. Using monitoring tools like SIEM solutions to transform data into insights give security analysts a clear outlook, allowing them to take all the necessary measures to protect your organization effectively.