Unifying remediation means bringing together and streamlining the process of addressing and resolving security issues across various aspects of an organization's digital landscape. In the context of Dazz and similar platforms, unifying remediation involves creating a cohesive and integrated approach to fixing security problems that may arise in code, cloud infrastructure, applications, and other IT environments.
Here are seven key aspects of what it means to unify remediation:
- Centralized approach: Instead of dealing with security issues in silos, a unified remediation approach centralizes the process. It allows security teams to manage and address problems from a single platform, providing a consolidated view of the organization's overall security posture.
- Cross-platform capability: Unifying remediation involves the capability to address security concerns across different platforms and environments. This includes tackling issues in source code, cloud services, applications, hybrid and on-premises infrastructure, and more.
- Data integration: It involves aggregating and integrating data from various sources, such as detection tools, to provide a comprehensive understanding of security risks. This integration helps in identifying the most critical issues, understanding their root causes, and determining effective remediation strategies.
- Automation and efficiency: Unifying remediation often leverages automation to streamline the response to security issues. Automation helps in quickly identifying, prioritizing, and addressing problems, reducing manual intervention and response time.
- Contextual understanding: A unified approach includes considering the context of security issues. This means understanding the relationships between different elements, such as how a vulnerability in the code may impact the security of cloud resources or applications.
- Flexibility with best-in-breed tools: Unification doesn't mean forcing organizations to adopt a one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, it allows flexibility for organizations to choose and integrate best-in-breed detection tools while providing a unified platform for remediation.
- Reporting and governance: Unifying remediation includes the ability to generate comprehensive reports for security governance and executive insights. This helps in tracking the effectiveness of remediation efforts and communicating the organization's security posture to relevant stakeholders.
In summary, unifying remediation is about creating a seamless and efficient process that transcends the traditional challenges of fragmented security solutions. It aims to provide organizations with the tools and capabilities needed to swiftly and effectively address security issues across the entire digital landscape.
Why is unifying remediation important today?
There are several reasons security teams and other stakeholders should plan to incorporate processes and technology to unify remediation.
- Attacks are happening faster
Security teams are facing unprecedented pressure to detect issues faster than ever before and show evidence that they are fixing them. Recent research has found that attacks, especially those carried out on cloud applications, now happen in hours, instead of weeks. To reduce security risk in today’s environment, security teams need to not only detect issues quickly but have processes and technology in place to remediate or mitigate the risks.
- Attack surfaces are growing
The technology landscape continues to grow and become more complex. Development and product teams are adopting open source applications, libraries, and myriad cloud services at a rapid pace. Additionally, the era of hybrid work means that are are more corporate devices per employee than ever before.
Detection across more assets and alerts inevitably introduces a greater alert volume, strengthening the need to unify prioritization and remediation processes no matter where issues are detected.
- Increased scrutiny and regulation
Regulators and boards have increased scrutiny on cybersecurity risk management, with an emphasis on not just identifying and disclosing issues, but also showing evidence of decreased cyber risk. A new SEC cybersecurity rule now requires some companies to disclose material incidents in four days and demonstrate strong cyber risk management practices.
In light of growing security and interest, security leaders should continuously show evidence that they’re mitigating security issues. This is a solid strategy and starting point to demonstrate a strong cyber risk management strategy is in place.
Why point solutions don’t work for remediation
Some cloud security and application security providers market "code to cloud" and other remediation features, yet this approach falls short of what customers need to meaningfully remediate issues.
First, these solutions often have limited context and a marginal view of a company’s entire IT environment - so they cannot be a one-stop-shop to remediate any security issues.
Second, many of these solutions focus on detection of security issues, but not the remediation of them. This means they often provide minimal guidance for addressing risks detected, which results in greater manual triage and analysis.
Third, point detection tools aren’t able to aggregate and correlate multiple data points to synthesize a single root cause of security issues. Without identifying a root cause, teams end up treating symptoms rather than fixing issues once and for all where they originate.
What other initiatives can unified remediation help with?
- DevSecOps: strengthening and remediating issues faster in turn allows developers to create products without friction. This enables security and development to work seamlessly together at the same speed, a true aim of DevSecOps practices.
- Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM): managing risk exposures means looking beyond CVEs, and continuously identifying and responding to security issues. Unified remediation is needed to fulfill the “response” element of CTEM, bringing a continuous remediation and orchestration process that many teams lack today.
- Application Security Posture Management (ASPM): remediation is a core facet of managing the risk of company applications. Unifying remediation across all company infrastructure, including applications can strengthen ASPM and other AppSec initiatives.
- Cloud Native Application Protection (CNAPP): CNAPP platforms have bundled many detection technologies across cloud environments: from malware detection, compliance, and identity and entitlements. Employing unified remediation alongside CNAPP platforms allows cloud security teams to prioritize and more effectively fix security issues detected by their CNAPP solutions to mitigate cloud security risks.
