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5 ways to analyze security and reduce threats

March 27, 2014 by Robert Siciliano — speaker, IDTheftSecurity.com

A deep analysis into security — via security analytics programs — can unveil crucial areas that need to be addressed if a business is serious about reducing the threat of a data breach.

A security analytics program can provide value by helping your business to:

Discover data leaks.Convinced your business is data leak-proof? See what stones that security analytics can turn over, and don’t be surprised if any leaks discovered have been ongoing, as this is a common finding — you can’t fix a problem that you don’t know exists.

Unearth new questions. Analytics programs can pose questions that a business owner never thought to wonder about. Analytics can reveal trends and make them visible.

Once questions and trends are out in the open, decision-makers in the organization will have a guideline that might even help them come up with additional questions about how to reduce the risk of threats.

Locate connections between data sources. Along lines similar to the point above, security analytics programs can bring forth associations between sources of data that an IT security team many not have unearthed on its own.

Think of data from different sources as being poured into a big funnel — what comes out the other end are patterns and associations among all that data, even though it was “poured” from various sources. Mixing it all together reveals the data connections.

Uncovering these associations can give a business a better understanding of disparate segments of the network.

Reveal operational IT issues. Take the previous points a step further and you get a revelation of patterns and connections within the IT operations realm — associations that can help mitigate issues with workflow and efficiency.

Perhaps a problem IT operations could be causing a drain on productivity. Even it it’s not not creating a problem per se, it can be improved to spark productivity.

Expose policy violations. Analytics can turn up policy violations that a business had no idea were occurring. Not all violations are malicious, but they can still be dangerous. Once they’re uncovered, they cannot be covered up; the next step is to do something about them.

Robert Siciliano is an identity theft expert to AllClearID, and the author of 99 Things You Wish You Knew Before Your Identity Was Stolen.