What Is a Cybersecurity Platform?

A cybersecurity platform is designed to give businesses a way to integrate security visibility, analysis, and controls across an array of security layers and data sources while enhancing protection, scalability, and performance.

Expanding visibility

An important benefit of deploying a cybersecurity platform is expanded visibility. Digital transformations often mean that organisations have an extremely diverse digital makeup that results in the need to support users, cloud deployments, networks, and devices in many places across different operating systems and environments.

Security platforms provide rich data gathering capabilities for visibility across all vectors: cloud, endpoint, servers, email, network, mobile, web, and IOT. They should integrate with partner products, which supplement their capabilities, and fit within the enterprise’s existing IT ecosystem and workflow. That may include SIEM/SOAR, identity and access management, vulnerability assessment, patch management, IT ticketing systems, threat intel, and more.

With expanded visibility and consolidated security functions, a cybersecurity platform can help organisations to better understand, communicate, and manage cyber risk.

Centralisation of analysis

Having centralised analysis is paramount to ensuring company-wide security.

The ability to see and address suspicious activity across the enterprise requires continuous risk and threat assessment. Having a common security analytics engine leveraged across the platform can facilitate this when applied to centralised data fed by both the native security stack and third-party solutions alike.

Integration across security layers gives you detailed insights, analysis, and actionable steps about the different kinds of risks targeting your organisation. Upon detection, security analysts can determine the type and source of the threat, if or where threat actors gained access to the system, where they moved throughout the organisation and what actions they took – all from a single console. Because the platform can correlate data and analyse activities as a whole, the company can quickly identify and respond to events to minimise the impact and expand security protocols, preventing further attacks.

Before the rise of cybersecurity platforms, companies had to rely on multiple point solutions to protect each aspect of their business. However, the more cybersecurity tools a company deploys, the less effective its defence. Siloed solutions cause security gaps that can be exploited by bad actors. Consolidating data and analytics across the enterprise enables organisations to identify aspects that individual products simply cannot.

Cybersecurity platform value

The need for unified cybersecurity systems is more critical than ever. Security teams and organisations are struggling to manage the increasing complexity introduced by digital transformation, data privacy, compliance, and a growing remote workforce that operates outside the enterprise’s perimeter. The result is an ever-evolving and complicated cyberattack surface that now necessitates a unified approach offering holistic, simplified, and effective control of cybersecurity risks and threats.

As the attack surface grows, so do the opportunities for attackers. Bad actors do not rest. Caught in the crosshairs, companies must remain aware of the emerging risks and how vulnerable they may be. They should also be able to proactively defend themselves against threats and quickly detect and respond to security events.

This is made possible by enacting a holistic approach to the cybersecurity attack surface lifecycle. Companies can discover the attack surface (visibility into their cyber assets and possible attack vectors), assess the risk (insights into risk exposure and vulnerabilities), and mitigate (enact security controls and response actions), all from a centralised system. By unifying and simplifying insight and control, the company is not only able to enhance overall security, but also improve operational efficiency, system performance, and scalability.

Mitigating risk

We’ve discussed providing comprehensive visibility and continuous cyber risk assessment as one of the benefits of a cybersecurity platform. But one of its most crucial capabilities is the ability to mitigate cyber threats and attacks. This means ensuring the right security controls are in place and configured properly for optimal protection.

Effective prevention is the first defence against bad actors, and swift detection and response can stop attackers from taking hold of a company’s systems.

A cybersecurity platform should include tools that offer excellent threat prevention, detection, and response capabilities, which are foundational to managing the risk mitigation stage of the cyberattack surface life cycle.

Integrated and connected

A cybersecurity platform’s effectiveness is only as great as its ability to integrate within the enterprise’s IT ecosystem. Certainly, a main goal is to reduce and consolidate the number of disparate tools, enabling seamless operations. Founded on the same platform, the services should work together to offer exponential benefits.

Still, no platform can provide all security and security-related functions for a company. An open API strategy is required for the integration with other systems to support providing critical information for added insight, performing additional security functions, automating tasks and response actions, and other key activities.

A platform is about consolidating where you can and tying it together with your other sources and systems to provide all the security and connectivity that your company needs to rely on in its daily operations.

With the world of cybersecurity still constantly evolving, services may change and develop over the coming years. The ability to easily interchange functions from different platforms with secure integration technology is crucial for enabling the organisation’s full-scale flexible protection.

Cloud-based architecture

A cybersecurity platform based on a cloud native architecture can offer analytical and computing advantages over on-premises architectures. The ability to leverage the power of the cloud to collect, synthesise, and analyse the high volume of data and activities feeding into the platform provides a level of function, performance, and scalability that would be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve with on-premises solutions.

While a platform can and should support certain hybrid environments and capitalise on data from existing or required on-premises components, its foundation must be cloud-based to ensure effective visibility, analytical capabilities, and mitigation options.

A platform’s value proposition is more effective and efficient security, which can be achieved only with a cloud-based solution that allows customers to continuously maximise the benefits on the inherent dev-ops process, whereby new capabilities or enhancements are regularly added to keep you ahead of the evolving threat landscape.

Future readiness

Ultimately, a cybersecurity platform is a forward-looking way to protect your company. Delivering all the aforementioned security capabilities under one roof, it allows you to monitor and protect your attack surface across multiple vectors. You can be assured its capabilities are always current to fight against new threats and cybercriminals.

With a centralised and constantly evolving toolbox of solutions, a cybersecurity platform is your greatest line of defence against bad actors who are seeking out ways to attack your organisation. It’s your foremost way of protecting your company against cyber threats and increasingly sophisticated attacks.

Cybersecurity Platform

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