The North American Cyber Alliance (NACA), a strategic relationship between BDO Digital USA and BDO Lixar Canada, has released their whitepaper on Managed Detection and Response (MDR). This whitepaper, titled 'A Modern Approach to Cybersecurity' looks at the modern challenges cybersecurity professionals face in 2022, and how emerging capabilities and methodologies can allow them to offload some of this burden.
 

5 Reasons Security Teams Struggle to Optimize Their Security Posture

Many businesses struggle when trying to manage risk and increase security posture. Here are a few of the challenges many businesses are facing in the current environment:
 

1. Overly Complex Solutions

Too often, cybersecurity solutions are overly complex and difficult for organizations to operate and sustain. If you can’t properly configure and manage your technology in a meaningful way it becomes useless, and costly.
 

2. Technology Sprawl

Adding technologies to fill gaps may initially sound like a good solution, but it can cause numerous problems down the road if the decision is not carefully considered. Ask yourself: will the organization be able to acquire the people and skills necessary to operate the solution? If not, does the solution create more issues as a result? Are costs being considered when looking to layer on a new solution?
 

3. Increasing Costs

Technology redundancy and overlap is a real thing that many organizations unknowingly fall victim to. As this redundancy grows, so does the cost to maintain it all. Developing a deliberate cybersecurity strategy and roadmap alongside the business will help ensure investments that are made in cybersecurity align with the organizations business objectives and direction. This leads to thoughtful cybersecurity spend and cost optimization over time.
 

4. Skill Acquisition

Highly skilled cybersecurity professionals are in tremendous demand and in short supply, making it more difficult to attract and retain these individuals. The lack of business investments in cybersecurity, burnout due to understaffing and alert fatigue, and increasing volume and complexity of threats all contribute to and exacerbate this challenge.
 

5. Alert Fatigue

Often, cybersecurity teams are overwhelmed with alerts – many of which end up as dead-ends and false positives. Spending time tracking these alerts is often distracting and can ultimately be detrimental to an organization’s security posture and budget.

These challenges are widely shared and experienced by many businesses who are trying to improve their security profile. Organizations are quickly realizing that there is no one solution, product, or business advisor that can eliminate all risk. However, with a risk-based approach to security programming, businesses can gain a significant advantage. This requires strong and complete technologies (such as Microsoft Security Solutions), strong processes (e.g., incident management), and strong talent (e.g., people who are qualified and highly trained).
 

How Organizations Can Improve their Security Posture Right Now

Modern cloud platforms, AI, and intelligence-enabled solutions are helping organizations gain more confidence in their threat defenses. By embracing the ease and reach of security in this modern environment, organizations can reduce risk and alleviate burdens without high cost and complexities.
 
Three emerging capabilities that can help: Cloud platforms, integrated solutions, and threat intelligence.
BDO Digital’s MDR Perpetual Defense approach is helping to increase the current pace of change. Businesses who are willing to embrace that change can significantly improve their security posture.
 
Instead of taking a short-term tactical approach to cybersecurity and only reacting to breaches instead of being proactive, BDO Digital recommends the following approach:
 

Step 1: Enable Investigations

BDO Digital prepares your environment by addressing accessibility to ensure you can act on any security issue that may arise.
 

Step 2: Prioritize Integrated Alerts

BDO Digital prioritizes integrated technologies such as cloud platforms, EDR, and solutions that incorporate threat intelligence filtering.
 

Step 3: Enhance Operational Processes

Once these high-quality alerts are available, your organization needs to have a defined internal process to respond to threats.
 

Step 4: Enhanced Use Cases

Once the fundamentals are firmly in place, BDO Digital expands the security aperture to add additional surveillance layers such as applications, business logic, or insider threat.
 

Step 5: Sustainment

Most importantly, organizations need to continuously monitor security postures to ensure maximum security. BDO Digital will assess the market along with its tech stack to help provide maximum effectiveness, efficiency, and value.
 
Today’s modern landscape is enabling cybersecurity capabilities that were never thought possible. Smart technologies are completely changing the industry’s approach to cybersecurity. With BDO Digital’s MDR Perpetual Defense approach to security, businesses can be well on their way to achieving security maturity while reducing burdens and risks. 
 

Contact us today to learn more about our modern, comprehensive cybersecurity approach.