As technology continues to change rapidly, and so do the tactics cybercriminals use. Responding to these changes requires adapting your security operations center (SOC), or eventually, you may encounter a security incident. Security is a journey, not a destination. You don’t just become secure and move on to another project. Instead, you continuously observe, adapt, and improve.
In 2019, Gartner coined the term secure access service edge (SASE), essentially merging WAN and security technologies into a single cloud-delivered service framework. If you want to be forward-thinking, you need to develop a SASE strategy. Your SOC should be an integral part of architecting a SASE journey because of the various strategic security capabilities and desired outcomes.
Enter the SOC of the future, and here at Netskope, we operate as Customer Zero. Since the Netskope SOC is responsible for monitoring and responding to threats under this evolving landscape, here are the critical areas of the SASE journey in which our SOC plays an integral role in developing.
Advanced analytics for better risk insights
As the security paradigm shifts, so should our approach to security analytics and risk insights. We leverage the capabilities provided by our Advanced Analytics reporting module to make decisions to better secure the environment and enforce policies that have already been agreed upon. The insights around suspicious and malicious activity are crafted and utilized to increase the meaningfulness of our detections and reduce response time. As we feed those insights back into our security stack through automation, our system and operations become smarter and faster, which ultimately shrinks dwell time for subsequent malicious attacks.
SaaS is the future of security
Software as a Service (SaaS) will continue to grow, and we secure these applications and services with technologies like a cloud access security broker (CASB) and access control. Although SaaS means enterprises are outsourcing most of the responsibilities to a service provider, the SOC is still responsible for monitoring the data. Therefore, you must secure your data with the available technologies while leveraging CASB technology.
Dynamic user/device fingerprinting
Identifying a user and device is based on multiple factors, including the user or device’s location, what type of system the user is on, and what applications the user/device is permitted to access. Fingerprinting a user and device dynamically determines what access rights they should have, regardless of their location. Therefore, the place of work can indeed be anywhere in the world at any time. Netskope continues to leverage this technology in our product to adapt to changes continuously. Our SOC relies heavily on it to discover accurate details associated with a user and device, the potential risk, relating the user and device to historical data, and comparing the user and device against behavior and attributes observed globally.
The office is everywhere
User performance needs and requirements for flexibility have forced the enterprise to move security to the application and host, rather than expecting traffic to tunnel through a security stack. Throughput obligations are a significant driver for Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA). Similarly, user traffic within the gateway security stack could and should still be encrypted, but that restricts our ability to monitor and secure web activity. Netskope secure web gateway (SWG) addresses this design problem by forcing user traffic through a cloud-based security stack. SWG is an excellent way to secure the traffic of remote employees. This way security will accompany the movement of users, devices, and data. We utilize Net