Cybersecurity: Building a fortress or staying ahead?

Too often, cybersecurity teams have taken the approach (in a manner of speaking), built a castle to defend their organizations, and then simply sat back and waited for attackers to try and climb the walls.

In today’s digital world, effective cybersecurity is anything but static. The world around us is constantly evolving and changing, and so is the threat landscape.

To become valuable, cybersecurity too must take on a dynamic, ever-evolving form. It should no longer be seen as a stone castle, but as a fluid, agile lifecycle – one that needs to be reviewed constantly and proactively defined and redefined.

At Capgemini, we separate this lifecycle into four pillars:

4 Pillars to Staying Ahead of Cybersecurity Threats

Define

The first step in the lifecycle process is to define. Before your cybersecurity posture can evolve, it is imperative to understand the baseline you are working from and what needs to be improved upon. This initial assessment looks at the protections in place for customers and takes compliance into consideration. Once the baseline is understood, you can then define a security strategy and roadmap tailored to your organization’s specific needs and business.

Protect

Having developed this strategy and roadmap, it’s time to implement and deploy or transform the security technologies that will protect your organization. This step is focused on making sure all critical data and assets are kept safe, as well as identifying and plugging all vulnerabilities across the cloud, IT, OT, and IoT systems.

Safeguard

The safeguarding stage is the real time protection of your systems and devices whereas protect is focusing on the deployment or transformation of a security measure.  The safeguarding phase is focused on keeping the level of security actual. This becomes important in the new world of the intelligent IT. Real time adjustment or adoption is needed in the new intelligent IT. Imagine a car driving through multiple countries. This means adopting to new compliance situation and doing identity governance in real time.

Defend

Next, we move to the defend stage. This has to be a proactive approach. It’s broader than technically monitoring the technologies in place to make sure they are working as designed, because it also involves checking the pulse of the world around you.

The focus cannot be on just detecting there is an attack. The focus is on predicting the attack (threat intelligence), being prepared for the attack (simulation), hunting the attacker down (threat hunting) as well as remediation.

If you detect that something has changed in your surroundings – for example, moving from an office-based working environment to remote working, or your organization is now more susceptible to cyberattacks because its role in society has changed – then this acts as a trigger to move back to the first stage.

Security lifecycle

As you can see each stage will trigger the next stage. At the same time the defend stage is and must be an input for the define stage. The information coming out of the defend stage is the trigger to go back to the drawing board and update the strategy. If an organization is not able to adopt and learn from what the defend stage is showing, soon they will be victim beyond the point they can handle and lose their customers. It’s not a simple return to the start of the loop. Your organization’s cybersecurity posture is levelling up; it is more intelligent and agile than it was at the beginning of the lifecycle, meaning the next time you reach the define, protect, Safeguard and defend stages they will look different.

Ignoring this lifecycle means missing opportunities to protect your organization and optimize security, both from an effectiveness and financial perspective.

How Capgemini can help

Orchestrating the flow of these pillars – at the right time and at the right pace – is key to creating a successful lifecycle. Capgemini is experienced in helping organizations across sectors achieve this. Just to cite an example, last year, we helped a multi-national bank define its cybersecurity posture in one of the most complex commercial cybersecurity assessments ever performed. Following the success of the define phase, the bank went on to use Capgemini’s cybersecurity orchestration services across all pillars.

Through Capgemini’s portfolio of cybersecurity services, your team will gain access to proven cybersecurity practitioners enabled by expertise and driven by experience. Our end-to-end services can accelerate your cybersecurity growth through every phase of your cyber lifecycle. We offer cybersecurity customized to individual business contexts and act as a partner in your cyber-transformation journey.

To find out more about how we can help you visit our Cybersecurity services page.

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