Is your organization’s security under threat? Take our test

It's a wild world out there, and getting wilder – certainly in terms of the mounting number of cybercriminals using refined tools and techniques to target organizations.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the more recent geopolitical strife and supply-chain disruptions have brought new complexity to the threat landscape, making it even harder for organizations to protect their networks.

Hybrid working has dramatically expanded the attack surface as employees are on the move far beyond the traditional defensive perimeter, leaving information security officers playing catch-up.

Now, cybersecurity teams must focus on threat prevention, detection, response and recovery, often while underresourced, overextended and still adapting to an ecosystem of distributed people, processes and technology.

Sound familiar?

It is now more critical than ever before to have visibility of your entire environment. Yet, your organization may lack a centralized view of threat activity and cybersecurity experts who can provide 24/7 insight across cloud, edge and on-premises environments, and make recommendations on improving your security posture.

Alerts with no action are a waste of time

Many cyberattacks find their mark despite organizations’ best efforts to avert them, leaving frustrated executives, staff and clients in their wake. The losses aren’t quantified just by the volume of compromised data or lost production time: hefty fines may result from breaches in regulatory compliance, and your brand value may suffer, too.

As your organization’s attack surface grows, your security focus needs to shift to alerts that can be prioritized, contextualized and converted into actionable outcomes.

Reducing the time to detect a threat is meaningless unless you also reduce the time to respond to and contain a threat. But limited expertise to hunt, validate and contain threats in a timely way may limit how quickly you can respond and increase the risk of high-impact threats. Your security operations center or security team may also be hampered by underused, incomplete or unintegrated installations of multiple security products and services.

7 questions to ask about your security strategy

1. Is your organization underresourced, with overextended teams trying to deal with new cybersecurity challenges?
2. Do you have expert analysts to examine and act on the security data you gather from multiple clouds, the edge and your on-premises environment?
3. Does your organization need to adopt new security strategies to accommodate hybrid and distributed working, which has expanded your potential attack surface in this borderless new environment?
4. Is your chief information security officer struggling to protect your expanded footprint from end to end?
5. Are you frustrated by limited visibility and end-to-end security across your network, including mobile users, cloud workloads and on-premises infrastructure?
6. Are your security practices lagging in the face of emerging and sophisticated threats, such as attacks on your application programming interfaces or cyberphysical systems?
7. Do you ask “Are we safe?” once attacks happen, rather than “Are we prepared?” before they do?

If you answered “Yes” to any of these questions, your organization is a good candidate for managed detection and response (MDR) services.

Speed up and improve detection and response rates

With a focus on quickly detecting, investigating and responding to threats around the clock, MDR services go beyond alerts and notifications. They provide remotely delivered, security-focused capabilities that can either bolster your internal security capabilities or replace elements of these. In this way, you instantly get the benefit of highly experienced people and the latest processes and technologies without having to acquire and manage those skills and technologies yourself.

MDR services gather data from endpoints, applications, cloud service layers and everywhere else across your network to investigate alerts and analyze logs for hard-to-find threats. This includes contextual information (for example, user identities, vulnerabilities and business importance).

All of this data is brought together intelligently to reduce the time between detecting and responding to threats.

Let an expert partner detect and contain threats while supporting your team

With MDR, detection capabilities (including advanced analytics and threat hunting), orchestration and automation deliver more efficient and effective outcomes, leading to improved metrics for your organization’s mean time to detect and mean time to respond. Organizations are increasingly looking for MDR providers that can initiate the measures needed to contain or disrupt a threat.

By using an MDR service, you can:

• Minimize the business impact of cyberattacks by disrupting threats early. Stop or limit threats from escalating beyond a compromised entity as soon as possible after the threat is detected through an efficient and effective response.
• Quickly improve your security maturity and cyberresilience with a turnkey solution, with fast deployment and transition to a predefined technology stack.
• Reduce operational risk by detecting threats that are missed by other controls. NTT’s advanced analytics with behaviour analysis, machine learning and kill-chain modelling finds threats faster, including those that evade the detection capabilities of other security controls.
• Gain threat visibility across your organization. Our MDR service combines event and evidence data from multiple sources, providing a centralized view of threat activity.

These services are evolving to include technologies and coverage beyond endpoint detection and response (including exposure management, cloud security, digital forensics and incident response, and log management).

Why NTT

Our capabilities enable us to combine leading technologies with our advanced, real-time analytics and threat hunting by security analysts to quickly detect, validate and contain threats, supported by various incident-response options and digital forensic capabilities.

Our cloud-native service offers a flexible consumption model with modular service options, based on throughput, and different service packages. 

Delivered as a managed service, it helps organizations minimize their risk as they continue to innovate and grow throughout their multicloud journey.

Read more about NTT’s Managed Cloud Security Services.

Sean Duffy is Vice President: Go-to-Market Cybersecurity at NTT