The entire range of procedures and technologies involved in protecting an organization's information systems and data from cyber threats can be thought of collectively as cybersecurity management. These various pieces include everything from developing and implementing company policies and employee training to monitoring and auditing IT and OT infrastructure for vulnerabilities. Overall, cybersecurity management aims to protect an organization's assets, maintain business continuity, and mitigate the impact of potential cyber threats.
Cybersecurity management involves several key processes and practices to protect an organization's digital assets comprehensively. Here's a look at some of the most important components:
Given the increasing frequency and sophistication of cyber threats, effective cybersecurity management has become essential for any entity that relies on digital systems. This includes a wide range of organizations across various sectors, from small retailers to massive corporations, as well as educational institutions, healthcare organizations, and government agencies. Benefits include:
Like everything else driven by the digital marketplace, cybersecurity management has evolved significantly over the decades. From the 1960s to the 1980s, security mainly focused on physical access to large mainframe computers, with basic measures emerging, like user authentication. As personal computers became popular in the 1980s and the internet began to take off in the 1990s, the landscape shifted. This era saw the rise of antivirus software and firewalls to combat increasing threats.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, cybersecurity management practices were formalized with the introduction of standards like ISO/IEC 27001 and regulations such as HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley, which emphasized compliance and structured security practices. The 2000s brought more sophisticated attacks, with high-profile breaches highlighting vulnerabilities and leading to widespread adoption of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), Network Detection and Response (NDR), and Full Packet Capture (FPC) driven Network Forensics tools.
Today, it's understood that best practices must include risk management, continuous monitoring, and employee training, especially with the rise of regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), enacted by the European Union in 2018. New technologies like cloud computing and IoT have introduced fresh challenges, prompting the adoption of concepts like Zero Trust, which assumes that threats can come from anywhere.
While your cybersecurity management plan is crucial for securing your business, the job of developing and implementing a plan that's effective, comprehensive, practical, and affordable can feel overwhelming. Here are some of the challenges businesses face in making this goal a reality:
Let's look at how NIKSUN can solve all these challenges for cybersecurity management.
Problem: Cyber threats are constantly changing, becoming harder to detect and predict; “zero-day” exploits take advantage of unaddressed vulnerabilities.
Solution: What matters here is speed and coverage. NIKSUN's all-in-one platform encompasses all modern security alarming techniques – such as Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), anomaly detection, AI/ML-behavior and heuristics based alarming, threat intelligence (TI / TIP), and content analysis – in one comprehensive cybersecurity management solution, boosting your ability to tackle sophisticated threats. NIKSUN also ingests, retains, analyzes, and cross-correlates an exceptionally wide variety of data sources – logs, device metrics (e.g., SNMP), flows, packets, cloud/app/virtual metrics, synthetic transactions, and more – for fast, powerful, and effective root-cause analysis. This approach of alarming on multiple fronts and a wide variety of data sources means NIKSUN can spot a broad spectrum of attacks with incredible speed for your entire infrastructure. Critically, NIKSUN's lossless capture of ALL the data across your infrastructure means even zero-day exploits can be discovered, with the ability to unmask “unknown-unknown” threats and even conduct retrospective analysis.
Problem: Finding the budget and expertise to implement an effective cybersecurity management program can be a challenge – for businesses of all sizes.
Solution: NIKSUN solves this problem by offering an extremely affordable platform that doesn't require expertise to set up or use. Organizations can install the NIKSUN platform in minutes and start reporting right away with quickly interpretable, high-level visualizations and executive-to-analyst level dashboards built automatically off the underlying data so you don't lose accuracy to human error/bias. Role Based Access Controls (RBAC) allow users and administrators to log into the same platform and see different configuration screens. Data collection is set up from the same all-in-one platform, too, along with the tools needed to open and manage incident Cases, eliminating the need to integrate with a ticketing provider if desired. We've designed NIKSUN's platform to be intuitive, comprehensive, and cost-effective at any scale, so you can manage all aspects of your organization's cybersecurity across your entire infrastructure from one platform and using your existing team.
Problem: Compliance requirements can be daunting and strain resources.
Solution: NIKSUN makes it easy to meet or exceed mandated compliance levels with minimum hassle, so your business runs smoothly. You can gather, track, and store everything you need to be NIST 800-171, CMMC, and HIPAA compliant, for example, all in one place. Use compliance dashboards in the NIKSUN platform to automatically create a full audit trail of what's happening in your entire organization and easily find the details you need for any event – making passing internal and external audits a breeze. Gain complete situational awareness of your infrastructure, seeing in an instant where you might have security holes or risks. Learn proactively about outdated systems and get alerted to potentially non-compliant incidents so you can follow up right away.
Problem: Employee education is a key part of cybersecurity management solutions and important for reducing errors, but how do you go about it?
Solution: NIKSUN solves this problem by offering friendly training modules you can share with your team to educate them about cybersecurity issues and approaches, cyber defense tactics, firewall technology, network and application performance monitoring practices, and more. Also, because NIKSUN delivers comprehensive intelligence in click-to-drill dashboards that cover executive-level insights as well as SOC root-cause analysis, executive users can see for themselves the who, what, where, and when of any security incidents – and whether the problem got resolved. This makes cybersecurity management available to both the C-suite in your organizations and to the SME analysts, helping to keep everyone informed and reducing the opportunity for errors that can happen when cybersecurity management teams work in silos.
Problem: Collaborating with vendors or partners can introduce vulnerabilities and prove costly and time-consuming.
Solution: NIKSUN's comprehensive, unified platform all but eradicates the risk that third-party vendors can put on your data and network security. Compliance and incident management are rolled right into the NIKSUN solution, empowering you to track access levels and potential vulnerabilities from dealing with outside vendors.
Problem: Handling large volumes of data securely while ensuring accessibility and compliance can be a challenge.
Solution: NIKSUN is designed to handle extreme scale without diminishing its analytic capabilities for any security, compliance, performance, or availability use cases. NIKSUN's platform can run over a hundred thousand threat intelligence rules across multi-Tbps of network traffic without dropping a single packet or other data type. This extreme scalability is why NIKSUN is the chosen provider of Full Packet Capture for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) in the Defense Information System Agency (DISA)'s network protection program.
Problem: Many organizations struggle to develop and test an effective incident response plan (IRP).
Solution: NIKSUN's simple setup lets you collect data easily from everywhere in your network and bring it back into one central, aggregated view. NIKSUN integrates with all your apps, databases, servers, and more from its powerful UI. Our click-to-download tool allows you to collect any type of data you want from any area in your infrastructure within a couple of minutes and with extreme ease. Once set up, NIKSUN's comprehensive solution is truly a one-stop shop for every conceivable use case –security, performance, compliance, availability, and more – monitoring all types of feeds to deliver a complete picture of your network, plus powerful analytics from any data you send. Incident and Case management allow you to watch over potential threats, assign personnel, escalate problems, and work through your response playbook in every scenario.
Problem: Disparate tools can mean a cohesive strategy and analysis is out of reach.
Solution: The disjointed architecture approach found in many operations generates a lot of inconclusive information and a lot of extra costs. NIKSUN does it differently. In fact, resolving these industry-level problems that stem from point-solutions became a core focus and determined our vision. Designed from the ground up with scalability in mind, NIKSUN's platform can ingest all the data from your entire infrastructure – logs, metrics, flows, packets, and more – providing a unified view into everything you operate – on-prem, cloud, virtual, etc. – and for every use case – security, performance, availability, compliance, and more. And best of all, you don't need to be a large organization to take advantage of NIKSUN's solution. Whether you're a small business or a major enterprise operation, you can use the same technology that safeguards the Department of Defense as the cornerstone of your cybersecurity management strategy, in one single, easy-to-use, and extremely affordable platform.
NIKSUN is the recognized world leader in empowering organizations to Know the Unknown®. Since 1997, we have been committed to delivering the most innovative cybersecurity management solutions for securing and optimizing the networks of over a thousand customers, including Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and service providers.
Our industry-leading suite of scalable, forensics-based cyber security and network performance monitoring products provides customers with in-depth and actionable insight into security threats, performance issues, and compliance risks. NIKSUN's patented real-time analysis and recording technology is the industry's most comprehensive cybersecurity management solution for securing and maintaining dynamic network infrastructure.