A security approach should be as individual as your business is. Yet, many organisations are finding themselves left with complex security stacks, made up of point solutions that don’t integrate well.

This is causing fragmented visibility, spiralling costs and placing huge pressure on already overstretched IT teams.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. While attackers are finding new, innovative ways to threaten organisations, a shift in security management is giving enterprises the chance to fight back.

More and more organisations are reaping the rewards of shifting cybersecurity management away from siloed solutions and independent technologies to a more holistic security ecosystem.

What can you expect?

With challenges come opportunities, and organisations have a lot to gain from shaking up their security approach to extract greater value.

By creating an integrated security ecosystem and joining the dots between your assets, you can better optimise cyber spend, become smarter with threat prioritisation and reduce the need for human intervention.

It’s a simple concept; an ecosystem is a group of technologies that work together to provide an outcome greater than the sum of its parts. Technology, all in harmony, on a single security platform.

How to build your own security ecosystem

“Great, where can I sign up?” is what you might be thinking. First things first, you need to create a balance between your changing business needs and existing security environment.

Only once you truly understand where you are now and prioritise what’s next for your business can you start your journey towards an integrated security ecosystem and find your individual path.

1.     Start your build

Think of step one as a security spring clean. But before you decide what to keep and what to throw, you need to know what you already have.

This is the time to be self-critical about how well you’re using each technology – and don’t be shy to get a wider understanding from different departments. After all, this is an opportunity to consolidate and optimise, so it’s important you have a true overview of what’s in place and your priorities.

2.     Decide your goals

Now, you need to look ahead and decide what outcomes you want to achieve. Think about whether you’re trying to remove a number of different vendors and if you’re looking to keep the most valuable solution and remove others. Answering these questions will help you to work out your criteria for consolidation.

It’s a case of figuring out what brings the most benefits and keeps employees secure, compared with what only contributes to the clutter. In Marie Kondo’s words: “What brings you joy” when it comes to security? There’s no right or wrong answer here – your ecosystem will be as unique as your business.

3.     Get grouping

Among your current technologies, you might have some duplication of capabilities. This can lead to unnecessary spend, more complicated and time-consuming management processes and an overlap of data. And the more siloed vendors, the harder it is to identify alerts.

Think about where you can group technologies, depending on their purpose or features. This can help you to identify duplication and, in turn, spot opportunities to consolidate and streamline the platforms, vendors and consoles you’re working with.

4.     Fill in the gaps

After your security spring clean, you’ll likely be left with some gaps to fill.

This is the point where you need to consider how any new technology will natively integrate with what you’ve decided to keep and whether you’ll get the best from each solution’s capabilities.

If you skip this step, you’ll end up with siloed visibility and this will impact your ability to detect security events – something you’ve worked hard to reduce in the last three steps.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach here, so working with a vendor-neutral partner can help you identify the right technologies. 

5.     Monitor progress

Monitoring progress against your road map is key to making sure your security ecosystem is performing as it should and whether the right things have changed. And if they have, you need to be able to say with confidence by how much.

You can share this progress with the wider business to support future funding, build trust and get backing for other projects further down the line.

But remember, a security journey doesn’t have a final destination; it must always keep responsive to changes within your organisation and the wider threat landscape.