The Security Doom Loop: Shelfware, Alert Cannons, and Analyst Fatigue

The Doom Loop is that downward spiral described by Good to Great author Jim Collins where a company takes actions intended to improve the business, but ultimately these actions only contribute to its painful cycle of decline.

Today in the typical enterprise, CISOs, CIOs and well-meaning SOC managers keep accumulating security software believing they can plug every conceivable gap and render the business safe. Yet the opposite is true. Analysts are now overwhelmed, tool sprawl is rampant, and thousands of detections generated by all these tools are largely ignored and never investigated.

Then you have the problem of increasing complexity which makes the job of threat detection a myth for many. The analyst has to navigate and correlate multiple silos of data just to get the facts and reach a state of truth before they can even determine if there is a valid threat or risk to the business.

So what happens is security ends up in a doom loop. The more tools accumulated in an effort to reduce risk, the worse the risk problem becomes. Software becomes shelfware, analysts burn out, operations are rife with waste, while finger-pointing and acrimony besiege IT, security and DevOps teams when there is an incident. Information silos are the norm and blind spots are a reality. All of which leads to CIOs resigning themselves to the eventuality of a breach.

Three Ways To Break The Doom Loop And Make Security Work For Your Business

Network Detection and Response (NDR) solutions provide a way out from this spiraling vortex of problems. With NDR you have one single source of data analytics, one immutable source of truth that can be shared by security, IT, network, and devops teams. You now have the ability to analyze every transaction and reconstruct every conversation on the network, between applications, infrastructure components, systems, devices and users.

Forensic level data is easily accessible to security, IT, and devops teams, enabling them to simultaneously understand and validate the scope of any incident and to gain insight into ongoing attacks or even to identify vulnerabilities.

1. Eliminate Tool Sprawl

Now you can eliminate multiple security and IT tools acquired for monitoring parts of your environment in one fell swoop. Complexity is gone and analysts can actually do the job they were hired for: protect the business.

2. Enable Collaboration Across IT, Security, and DevOps

Collaboration is spawned and vitriol disappears as war rooms become a thing of the past. Using the same set of data analytics, in real time, IT and security teams can determine if an event is normal network activity or malicious. They can quickly make an informed decision on how to remediate. Visibility, and the time to reach a state of certainty about the facts and make an informed response, is reduced from days or hours to minutes.

3. Eliminate Blind Spots & Friction By Sharing Data and Tearing Down Silos

Information silos are eliminated, removing the need to manually correlate data from multiple logs and tools. And since data exfiltration can happen in minutes, having immediate, real-time-accurate data from a single source of truth is no longer a luxury but a necessity.

Previously there were many blindspots in your environment. Encrypted data, hybrid networks, unmanaged devices, containerized applications, and the list goes on. But the one thing all these constructs have in common, is they will traverse the network. Only NDR applications can provide the insights and facts at the speed and scale that modern security demands. The unknown becomes the known, and the time to visibility is reduced to zero.