Senior security leaders must keep pace with today’s shape-shifting cyberthreat landscape.
Yet, their time is constantly diverted by having to meet governance and compliance regulations, demonstrate ROI for security investments, increase employee training, and respond to unanticipated business risks.1
In other words, security is no longer solely a technical function; it’s now a business imperative. For example, 85% of security executives regularly engage with their boards of directors, and 46% say their boards have cybersecurity experience.2
That’s because cyberthreats present significant risks for businesses. The global average cost of a data breach in 2023 was $4.45 million, a 15% increase from 2020.3
Yet, balancing technical and business requirements is challenging. Many organizations must adhere to shifting regulatory environments, security skillset shortages, tool sprawl, a lack of visibility across data and infrastructure silos, and manual security processes.
This is a lot to manage, especially considering the inevitability that your organization will experience a security incident.
Traditional cybersecurity approaches are no longer effective. It’s insufficient to simply detect and respond to an incident; senior security executives must have capabilities — from automated backup and recovery functionality to the ability to understand how an incident might scale throughout the organization — that prepare them for inevitable attacks.
A new strategy is required, one that delivers four elements:
- Autonomous security
- Actionable threat intelligence
- Continuous compliance
- Full cyber resiliency
These elements cannot be achieved in isolation; organizations need trusted advisors and partnerships with industry-leading experts that help marry deep expertise and advanced security capabilities.
4 keys to addressing the business imperative
Organizations can move toward a real-time, single-pane-of-glass view of their cybersecurity posture by focusing on these four areas:
1. Autonomous security
The No. 1 challenge that organizations encounter within their security operations: skills and knowledge shortages.4 These gaps are exacerbated by high volumes of alerts and manual tasks – such as threat detection and response – that drag down the business’s capacity for cyber resiliency.
How to move forward: A solution that provides analytics and predictive models for automated, proactive security.
2. Actionable threat intelligence
Ransomware alone is a significant concern; there were 493 million ransomware attempts worldwide in 2022.5 A set-and-forget detection strategy is not viable. For organizations that use multiple security tools and have multiple data silos, it’s imperative to continually monitor activity across the entire digital estate. Bad actors regularly evolve their tactics, making it critical to have cutting-edge threat intelligence that is actionable and in real-time.
How to move forward: Amazon Security Lake delivers a single-pane-of-glass dashboard that integrates dozens of independent software vendor (ISV) security products, enabling you to better leverage your security data and mitigate siloed data to reduce the risk of a breach.
3. Continuous compliance
Although the specifics vary by industry, the risks of noncompliance range from regulatory fines to security breaches — and can be expensive. For example, a US company was recently ordered to pay 2.5 million Norwegian kroners (approximately US$240,000)6 for failing to disclose a breach within the dictated GDPR timeframe. Yet, keeping on top of ever-changing regulatory obligations can seem like trying to hit a constantly moving target.
How to move forward: A framework for continuous monitoring and remediation that rapidly identifies changes and creates actionable insights for a real-time view of compliance status.
4. Cyber resiliency
Boosting corporate resiliency and rapidly responding to security incidents are top priorities among security leaders.7 The time to recovery data and systems, even while under attack, is crucial. Each additional minute of system downtime wreaks havoc on the business.
How to move forward: A cyber solution that integrates with security software can accelerate your team’s capacity to manage, detect, respond, and recover.
AWS: Secret weapons that solve security challenges
The future of cybersecurity is a single pane of glass that incorporates automation, actionable intel, compliance posture, and the ability to not only detect but also manage and recover. From a business standpoint, this requires gaining predictive insights via shared security data and sophisticated analytics. AWS delivers on this mission with three secret security weapons:
Amazon Security Lake (ASL)
ASL solves the problem of data siloes by centralizing your cybersecurity posture with integrated tools. It is purpose-built to ingest data and security signals from a variety of sources, including AWS environments, software-as-a-service providers, on-premises, and clouds. Doing so enables businesses to automatically gain a holistic, centralized understanding of organizational security.
For example, ASL can simplify compliance monitoring by seamlessly integrating your data. It also optimizes security data management across hybrid environments to reduce the burden of managing multiple security tools. In addition, ASL:
- Increases visibility to solve the siloed data issue
- Streamlines data at scale
- Optimizes security data for more efficient storage
- Enables the use of your own analytics tools so that security teams retain data control and governance
Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF)
The OCSF is a collaborative, open-source effort that provides standards for common security events across networks, devices, and applications. The framework unifies data in the ASL, which then enables organizations to use data analytics tools to rapidly identify patterns and automatically gain actionable insights.
OCSF normalizes security telemetry without the need for manual intervention, and it offers a real-time view of both your threat posture and compliance status.
Amazon Bedrock
Amazon Bedrock provides everything you need to build and scale generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) applications — including a wide range of foundation models and the serverless infrastructure to integrate and deploy your AI apps. More importantly, the environment is built with security and privacy in mind.
For example, Amazon Bedrock ensures you have full control over the data used to create your GenAI workloads. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. You can also create, manage, and control encryption keys using the AWS Key Management Service. Identity-based policies provide further control over your data, helping you manage what actions users and roles can perform, on which resources, and under what conditions.
The key benefits of Amazon Security can be viewed in this way: ASL aggregates threat intelligence from more than 100 security providers; OSCF creates a common framework so that multiple security products can communicate with each other; and Bedrock ensures the right data and regulatory information is always available. These three together help business and technical leaders to always know what their security and compliance postures are.
Lean on partners for additional security
It’s not only enterprises and organizations that must manage today’s new wave of cybersecurity. AWS, along with its industry-leading partners, system integrators, and ISVs are accelerating their investments to advance integrated, single-pane-of-glass platforms that are not only proactively responsive, but also cyber-resilient.
The AWS Global Partner Security Initiative leverages the deep expertise and differentiated security capabilities of AWS Global Systems Integrators Premier Partners with secure, scalable cloud technology from AWS.
The Global Partner Security Initiative focuses on six pillars that when applied together deliver integrated, end-to-end threat intelligence:
- Executive readiness
- Security-led cloud migrations
- Managed detection and response (MDR)
- Continuous compliance
- Incident response and cyber forensics
- Emergency recovery and restoration
The partnership revolves around the security flywheel, in which solution providers and AWS contribute to a continuous cycle of ensuring predictive insights, shared security data, and sophisticated analytics (see chart).
The AWS vision for cybersecurity
Partners have been specifically selected for their expertise. The global partners and their areas of focus include:
- Accenture: Offers a suite of security and compliance modules. For example, its Accenture mySecurity platform includes diagnostic insights, as-a-service capabilities, and transformation enablement.
- Eviden: A worldwide managed security services provider whose MDR solution is standardized on ASL.
- IBM: A market leader that has architected its technology products to integrate seamlessly with AWS services. IBM also has dedicated resources and support for AWS competencies.
- Kyndryl: Enables cyber resilience and MDR with an approach that focuses on four pillars: anticipate, protect, withstand, and help businesses quickly recover from security threats.
- PwC: Offers a human-led, tech-powered approach to supporting business objectives. Its security resources support a variety of cyber use cases, including fraud and forensics detection and compliance.
The Global Partner Security Initiative will also include tech giants Capgemini, Deloitte, Tech Mahindra, and Wipro — each bringing their own expertise to the security innovation table.
The bottom line
Businesses operate amid a new and heightened security landscape in which the amount of time it takes to detect, manage, and respond to threats has become crucial.
The business imperative now requires autonomous security. Organizations need to be able to rely on AI to predict the threat before it happens, as well as the ability to automate your response, including recoverability and resiliency.
AWS and the Global Partner Security Initiative are changing the security game for organizations in all industries. Read more about it here.