Steve Riley is a VP and Field CTO at Netskope. Read Steve Riley's full executive profile here.
The sprawling adoption of software-as-a-service applications is an expanding source of risk for organizations—specifically with regard to data theft and data leakage. As such, you need to know what’s going on with your applications and data.
With answers in hand, you’re in an informed position to identify risks and do something about them. But establishing comprehensive visibility of applications and data depends on the right security capabilities. In combination, they might even help you predict the future.It's important to start with a clear understanding of where your company has already been. You need to discern where files have moved to, who's been manipulating them, which users present more risk than others and what business units tend to be involved in riskier activities. The API-based capabilities of a cloud access security broker offer the ability to ask questions about where your data has been and why it might’ve been there. A user and entity behavior analytics feature can tell you similar things about what your people have done in the past, which can be a predictor of what they might do in the future. Other advanced analytics tools can capture what actions people have taken, where they’ve done it and with what resources—which can again provide useful information to help anticipate future events. You need to know what has already happened because boards of directors often ask about this. Security leaders need tools to support an intelligent conversation about what happened last week, last month and last year to demonstrate that you're making progress toward reducing risk and helping security become a business enabler. You can demonstrate this value by showing how a new security control has already blocked various types and quantities of attacks. Compliance with data privacy laws and regulations is another important reason for being able to document past events. Many organizations periodically need to report to regulators what has happened. A mechanism for auditing and reporting that simplifies the operational churn of proving compliance is mandatory.To understand what’s happening in the present, you need security services that can get inline to inspect data and activities in the current moment—notably, the inline portion of a CASB. In the early days, some CASBs were API-only. Vendors claimed these were easy to install because they didn’t require tricky inline configuration and they weren’t a single point of failure. How useful is it, though, to learn about risky situations after they already occurred? The only way to mitigate risk in real time is by getting inline to immediately observe and respond to what's going on. Other services that support real-time inspection visibility include secure web gateway , zero-trust network access , firewall-as-a-service and digital experience management . All of these tools can help identify when and where sensitive data is moving and determine if someone might be participating in a risky activity. Knowing what’s happening right now is useful because it can help you offer “just in time” education via coaching messages. Coaching is often more effective than the typical annual two-hour security refresher training course, which people typically forget 30 minutes after they close the browser window. Real-time awareness can also help you manage your environment better, such as by identifying current policies that need improvement. Imagine that you’re just starting to define policies that govern the movement of sensitive information. People begin reporting that they can no longer accomplish certain tasks in their workflows. When logs indicate that a certain policy unnecessarily activates, you now know the context around why that happens. Use this context to adjust the policy—making it more fine-grained and appropriate to your needs.What has happened and what might happen are frequently related. Observing the past with advanced analytics and UEBA can help you better predict the future because they identify patterns that are likely to repeat themselves. History might not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Furthermore, SaaS security posture management offers proper governance of applications, which helps to protect critical business information. SaaS applications are configured loosely out of the box, which can introduce opportunities for data leakage and theft. SSPM offers suggestions as to what might happen if you don't make a configuration change and why that's important. In addition to staying ahead of risk exposures, understanding potential consequences can help security leaders in strategic planning with C-suite executives and the board. You can justify improvements in policies, processes and maybe even in people—whether that's sending them for more education or increasing headcount. Forward-looking visibility can inform regulatory conversations as well. Despite conforming to the letter of all applicable regulations, your risk management strategy might not fully anticipate infrastructure changes or emerging threats. A clear understanding of what might happen next can help you justify and get approval for doing more than the minimum required.Information security has traditionally depended on a cycle of three main functions: prevent, detect and respond. You try to prevent, but sometimes your prevention efforts won't be enough. So you also need to detect when prevention efforts fail. But you're not going to detect everything, either. Something will get through anyway. Now you need to respond to that incident. What we must do now is add"predict" to the front of this cycle. If we can improve our predictions, we can improve each subsequent phase. How do you get good at predicting? You have to get really good at knowing what has happened, what is happening and what might happen to your critical applications and data. This provides visibility that actually matters—a picture with depth, breadth and clarity.
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