Post Syndicated from KC Higgins original https://blog.rapid7.com/2023/11/16/manage-enterprise-risk-at-scale-with-a-unified-holistic-approach/

The rapid pace of technological change and the attendant rise of cyber threats in both speed and number leave most organizations at a disadvantage.

Historically, many firms faced this challenge simply by purchasing more technology in the hopes that the latest threat protection software would keep their data safe. But those days have come to an end. Not only have budgets come under increased scrutiny, but the sheer number of tools in most environments has become a handicap as well: Tools don’t always work well together and the expertise required to manage them remains in short supply. According to some analysts, the current complexity and diversity of tech environments also hampers visibility into vulnerability risks, at least in part because data must be obtained from disparate systems or laboriously exported into spreadsheets and data analytics platforms to fine tune and understand relevant risks.

For organizations looking for a unified perspective of risk across their cloud and on-prem environments, prioritizing risk, eliminating repetitive manual work, maintaining complete risk visibility, and consolidating point solutions will enable them to meet cyber threats with speed and success.

Not all Threats are Created Equally

You’ll hear companies claim to stop all threats everywhere all the time, but such claims are neither true nor practical – anyone who follows the news even casually knows that the threats keep coming. The key is to understand which threats pose the largest risks and mitigate those first. Tools like Rapid7’s InsightVM analyze enterprise-wide asset and vulnerability data to identify the actions that will have the largest impact on risk reduction in a given organization. Instead of thousand-page lists of individual patches to apply, organizations can make informed, up-to-the-minute decisions on how to allocate resources for maximum risk reduction.

InsightVM also offers live dashboards that update whenever new data is discovered, allowing teams to track the attack surface and risk as they change. Dashboard views can even be customized for different technical teams or stakeholders as organizational perimeters expand into the cloud and beyond. Other approaches, such as cloud risk management, allow organizations to manage, prioritize, and act on risks within the large scale of modern multi-cloud environments and on-prem footprints by helping them understand the potential impact of a particular risk and its likelihood of exploitation.

You Can’t Protect What You Can’t See

In addition to trying to tackle every imaginable risk, maintaining maximum visibility into attack-surface risk is the only way organizations can hope to minimize security gaps while managing the many containers, cloud services, and virtual devices that are often spun up and down without direct involvement from the security team.

While InsightVM integrates directly with dynamic infrastructure to give full visibility into the risks posed by these assets, solutions like Executive Risk View provide complete visibility into hybrid-environment risk by ingesting data with purpose-built collection mechanisms – regardless of whether work is running on-premises or in the cloud.

Executive Risk View also aggregates and normalizes disparate risk assessments from on-premises and cloud environments for a unified, interactive dashboard that brings clarity to discovered vulnerabilities and the risks each represents so that security teams can prioritize remediation actions and share insights cross functionally. Insight into how vulnerabilities translate into business risk – and which of them are most likely to be targeted by attackers – means teams can quickly and effectively address the risks that pose the most significant danger.

Simplify the Stack

Prioritization, automation, and visibility are all foundational elements of unified risk protection, but if organizations rely on multiple vendors to manage them, they will continue to lose efficiencies and battle tool proliferation. Cloud Risk Complete offers all of these solutions from one comprehensive platform and single subscription model. This means organizations can secure hybrid environments from development to production; detect and address risk across endpoints, cloud workloads, and traditional infrastructure; and perform dynamic application security testing to remediate application risk – all with a single subscription.

Learn more about the ways Rapid7 can help increase your security posture.

Post Syndicated from Pauline Logan original https://blog.rapid7.com/2023/07/18/managing-risk-across-hybrid-environments-with-executive-risk-view/

Over the last decade or so, organizations of all shapes and sizes across all industries have been going through a seismic shift in the way they engage with their customers and deliver their solutions to the market. These new delivery models are often underpinned by cloud services, which can change the composition of an organization’s IT environment drastically.

As part of this digital transformation, and in turn cloud adoption, many administrators have moved from maintaining a few hundred or so physical servers in their on-premises environment to running thousands and thousands of cloud instances spread across hundreds of cloud accounts—which are much more complex and ephemeral in nature.

The Modern Attack Surface is Expanding

Whether the impetus for this transformation is an attempt to maintain or gain a competitive advantage, or even as a result of mergers and acquisition, security teams are forced to play catch-up to harden a rapidly expanding attack surface. This expanding attack surface means that security teams need to evolve the scope and approach of their vulnerability management programs, and because they’re already playing catch-up, these teams are often asked to adapt their programs on the fly.

Making matters worse, many of the tools and processes used by teams to manage and secure those workloads aren’t able to keep up with the pace of innovation. Plus, many organizations have given DevOps teams self-service access to the underlying infrastructure that their teams need to innovate quickly, making it even more difficult for the security team to keep up with the ever-changing environment.

Adapting Your Vulnerability Management Program to the Cloud Requires a Different Approach

Assessing and reducing risk across on-premises and cloud environments can be complex and cumbersome, often requiring significant time and manual effort to aggregate, analyze and prioritize a plethora of risk signals. Practitioners are often forced to context switch between multiple tools and exert manual effort to normalize data and translate security findings into meaningful risk metrics that the business can understand. As a result, many teams struggle with blind spots resulting from gaps in data, or too much noise being surfaced without the ability to effectively prioritize remediation efforts and drive accountability across the organization. To effectively manage risk across complex and dynamic hybrid environments, security teams must adapt their programs and take a fundamentally different approach.

As is the case with traditional on-premises environments, you need to first achieve and maintain full visibility of your environment. You also need to keep track of how the environment changes over time, and how that change impacts your risk posture. Doing this in an ephemeral environment can be tricky, because in the cloud things can (and will) change on a minute to minute basis. Traditional agent-based vulnerability management tools are  too cumbersome to manage and simply won’t scale in the way modern environments require. Agentless solutions deliver the real-time visibility and change management capabilities that today’s cloud and hybrid environments require.

Once you establish real-time and continuous visibility, you need to assess your environment for risk, understanding your organization’s current risk posture. You’re going to need a way to effectively prioritize risk, and make sure your teams are focusing on the most pressing and impactful issues based on exploitability as well as potential impact to your business and customers.

Finally, once you’ve gotten to a point where you can identify which risk signals need your attention first, you’ll want to remediate them as quickly and comprehensively as possible. When you’re operating at the speed of the cloud, this means you’re likely going to be relying on some form of automation, whether that’s automating repetitive processes, or even having a security solution take action to remediate vulnerabilities on your behalf. Of course, you’ll need to be measuring and tracking progress throughout this process, and you’ll need a way to communicate the progress you and your team is making to improve your risk posture with trending analysis over time.

So, as you can see, it’s not that “what” security teams need to do is significantly different, but “how” they go about it has to change, because traditional approaches just won’t work. The challenge is that this isn’t an either/or scenario. Organizations that are operating in a hybrid environment need to adapt their programs to be able to manage and report on risk in on-premises and cloud environments simultaneously and holistically. If not, security leaders will struggle to make informed decisions on how to effectively plan their budgets and allocate resources to ensure that cloud migration doesn’t have a negative impact on its risk posture.

Manage Risk in Hybrid Environments with Executive Risk View

Executive Risk View, now generally available in Rapid7’s Cloud Risk Complete offering, provides security leaders with the comprehensive visibility and context needed to track total risk across both cloud and on-premises assets to better understand organizational risk posture and trends.

With Executive Risk View, customers can:

• Achieve a complete view of risk across their hybrid environments to effectively communicate risk across the organization and track progress.
• Establish a consistent definition of risk across their organization, aggregating insights and normalizing scores from on-premises and cloud assessments.
• Take a data-driven approach to decision making, capacity planning and drive accountability for risk reduction across the entire business.

Sounds too good to be true? You can see it in action for yourself in a new guided product tour we recently posted on our website! In addition to taking the tour, you can find more information on Executive Risk View in the docs page.