Navigating Cyber-complexities With Single Pane Of Glass (SPOG)

Amid the rapidly evolving business landscape, organizations across the world are adopting novel digital initiatives, necessitating holistic cyber health understanding. A report found security as the top strategic priority for over 75% of companies. To improve cybersecurity, a business is supported by various personnel with specific roles to manage diverse technologies and maintain overall cyber health. Their roles allow them to see the same information – logs – from varying angles based on hierarchies, purpose, or metrics. Hence, it becomes essential for security teams, DevOps engineers, and administrators of an enterprise to combine information from multiple data points to derive meaningful conclusions for actionable security measures. Such simplified quantification and data-driven analytics can help strengthen businesses’ overall cyber visibility and defense.

Importance of combining different security perspectives

Organizations contending with data collation and analysis across diverse systems and applications can use security information and event management (SIEM) capabilities to streamline logs, strengthen cybersecurity measures, and uphold overall governance and compliance. SIEM can easily aggregate logs by integrating disparate systems and technologies, offering a comprehensive operational view via a single dashboard.

For instance, a healthcare institution’s IT team troubleshoots; meanwhile, its security team screens for breaches while the applications team is refining and optimizing applications. All teams can leverage the SIEM platform, where the same data with diverse labels, subsets, and metrics are combined and enriched. This simplified output and shared insight can help teams make informed decisions and perform their functions securely.

Gaining a complete operational picture with SIEM

Today, security teams, DevOps engineers, and administrators can obtain a shared insight into their operating environment with a single pane of glass (SPOG). It helps enterprises screen various organizational entities in collecting, aggregating, and analyzing large datasets to detect real-time threats and breaches.

A proficient SPOG dashboard has the following features:

• Intuitive and well-organized graphical user interface for effortless navigation
• Streamlined data access system for quick retrieval of latest information
• Customizable displays tailored to end-users’ specific needs

To understand these benefits better, let’s explore how a company’s IT and security team focusing on devices and platforms can leverage SPOG for visibility in two main areas:

System-level data analysis: Operational data is collected from every device in their IT environment, analyzed and enriched into contextual insights. These insights can aid IT and security teams to scale up, upgrade security solutions, and invest in new technologies, among others

Remote device management: Cloud-native solutions can enable IT and security teams to access interfaces of individual devices to review security events and activities

Other essential SPOG features include threshold-based event alerts, KPI-based health and performance tracking, root cause analysis, and remote debugging. Further, a robust Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) with SPOG enhances cybersecurity management by converting data into valuable insights via an enrichment server.

Earlier blogs highlighted enhanced governance via compliance monitoring and reporting and AI’s role in streamlining security operations through SIEM. However, it is also essential to standardize security logs into a common timeline for businesses to make prompt strategic decisions.

Why real-time view and presentation of data is crucial?

Consider a company’s firewall security team utilizing a SIEM platform. Firewall logs are gathered in SIEM, and SPOG standardizes diverse datasets to a common timeline (IST, MGTR, CST, Pacific, etc.) for efficient comparison and swift response to cyber threats. Here, real-time security log visibility is crucial for CISOs to enhance policies and safeguard critical data.

The MITRE ATT&CK® Framework’s tactics techniques procedures (TTPs) come into play, detecting potential threats by emulating cybercriminals’ approaches for a strong defense. CISOs gain context from timelines that display individual and related security incidents, enabling aligned measures with universal TTP guidelines.

Larger companies with complex technology integrations demand a 360-degree cybersecurity view. MSSP’s SPOG provides a unified view for end users with a single login, enabling them to access multiple programs without switching applications.

Benefits of MSSP solution

Businesses can gain complete IT estate visibility in both on-premise and cloud-based environments through MSSP’s evidence-based insights on real-time security, operations, asset, and user data analytics. Security operations center (SOC) teams can use observable data through automated telemetry gathered from network and security points such as routers, apps, or equipment. Here are some advantages of MSSP that firms can employ to improve their cyber posture:

Security analytics: Security teams can aggregate enterprise-wide data for trend identification, pattern recognition, and security risk spotting, empowering proactive defense

Intuitive navigation: Personnel can leverage MSSP’s intelligent dashboard to gain a consolidated view of security events, alerts, and threats, segmentable by accounts, regions, or services

User activity monitoring: Security leads can use SPOG to monitor user behavior across organizational levels, enhancing insider threat detection while maintaining system integrity

Vulnerability assessment and penetration testing (VAPT): Regular VAPT processes aid CISOs in identifying weaknesses and fortifying the infrastructure, applications, and endpoints

Compliance monitoring: MSSP’s unified view helps companies’ compliance monitoring, streamlining adherence to protocols and cross-border regulatory standards

While it is evident how organizations benefit from MSSP with SIEM-as-a-service, in the coming days, businesses must proactively uncover hidden patterns and connections within cyber activities to remediate potential threats. This is achievable by integrating threat hunting into MSSP to drive enhanced SPOG capabilities.

Removing security pain points through single-pane observability

CISOs must constantly review security controls to enhance their organization’s visibility. An enhanced MSSP with SIEM-as-a-service can help enterprises with real-time fault analysis and remedial actions, thus strengthening the overall cyber posture. MSSPs integrated with threat hunting can help CISOs leverage superior search capabilities to probe simple queries related to attack activities across disparate organizational sources.

To substantiate, a recent Gartner report highlights nearly 75% of employees operating outside IT’s visibility by 2027 – a notable increase from 41% in 2022. CISOs can utilize big data output to detect unusual activities that could negatively impact organizations in the future. Therefore, future innovations in SPOG and SIEM must extend beyond organizational boundaries and the developers’ workloads when introducing upgrades, new technologies, or addressing service issues.