Written by:
Purandar Das Keeping a fully staffed security team is challenging for businesses. Pushes to cloud and remote work have kept these teams over-stressed, with almost half working overtime and being kept up at night concerned about the stress from work. Many will look for work elsewhere if their situation does not improve, and replacing them is no easy task with global cybersecurity skills shortages of almost 2.7 million professionals.
Finding a solution to this staffing need requires addressing the foundational problems about why you have a staffing problem in the first place. Excessive time wasted on point solutions and overly complex processes drive staff stress and discontentment. This article helps your organization identify the areas of your architecture that are making life more difficult for your existing workforce and locate solutions to streamline operations and simplify security.
Operational Inefficiencies
Contributing to the stress of security staff is an overly complex architecture or data and security tools. Much of this was implemented to deal with the pandemic, while some of it resulted from cloud-first initiatives that started well before. Either way, they are tasked with protecting highly sensitive data, even when stored in the cloud or on personal endpoints.
Too Many Things to Do
Organizations implement numerous point solutions to address specific security and privacy concerns with data in the cloud to accommodate migration to the cloud. These solutions effectively address their given missions, but rarely bring additional functionality beyond that. This has led to a proliferation of point solutions requiring management and oversight to function correctly.
As these solutions fall within the security space, the burden of management falls to the already overloaded security teams. Every solution added requires time for an administration already in short supply. As teams get spread thin, some of the management and monitoring tasks may not be quickly addressed, creating gaps for attackers.
Complex Architectures Add Risk
The other challenge of having too many solutions is that it becomes more difficult to configure all solutions properly. Every endpoint put in place creates another opportunity for something to be misconfigured or overlooked.
Misconfigurations can create openings for attackers, and this is especially true in the cloud. Approximately 80% of data breaches in the cloud were directly attributable to misconfigurations. In recent studies, most surveyed attribute the misconfigurations identified in their infrastructure to overly complex architecture. When the architecture is too complicated, there are too many variables to assess when implementing new solutions effectively, so it is easy to overlook possible risks.
Simplifying Operations
The clearest solution to easing the burden on existing workforces is simplifying operations. Finding solutions that are easier to use and deliver multiple functionalities can ease the burden on existing staff. These solutions also decrease friction or implementation and operations, further reducing time investments for staff.
Finding More Efficient Solutions
It is important to note that these efficient solutions must still deliver multiple capabilities to serve any lasting benefit. Much of the existing problems stem from overly complex infrastructure and too many solutions. Better tools help decrease complexity by fulfilling multiple security needs within one platform.
Not every solution that delivers multiple capabilities is a good fit for simplifying and improving efficiency. The best technology works with existing solutions and provides centralized management and monitoring. This prevents staff from juggling multiple interfaces and consoles to maintain security.
Decreasing Friction
Frictionless technology is another critical aspect of new solutions that will ease the burden on your existing workforce. These solutions should be easy to install, set up, and manage. Using centralized single-pane-of-glass interfaces to oversee operations reduces the effort required for staff to keep operations running. These frictionless solutions also need to be easy to deploy. Rather than taking investments of months or years, they need to embrace the agility of the cloud so that they can be integrated and deployed in days or weeks.
The other aspect of frictionless systems is the importance of automation. It is easier to integrate automation across workflows and functionalities in systems that deploy multiple security capabilities. This helps to reduce the number of hands-on tasks that your operational teams need to deal with and ensures that security functions are maintained, even when staff is at maximum bandwidth.
Comprehensive Protection
Sotero delivers a complete data security platform to streamline and simplify your operations. Sotero integrates access management and privacy capabilities to provide data security, change management, and access control under one umbrella. By combining these functionalities under an easy-to-use single-pane-of-glass interface, teams can quickly and efficiently manage their data security and privacy needs in one location.
By centralizing these capabilities, Sotero leverages intelligent automation to guarantee that new assets and applications added to the security fabric inherit security capabilities, reducing the load on your staff and simplifying operational overhead.
Schedule a demo today to learn more about how the Sotero Data Security Platform can help make the most of your existing workforce.