5 Reasons Why You Need 24×7 Cyber Security Monitoring

Hundreds and even thousands of security events can flood your network every hour of every day. Your team may have a significant challenge of sifting through these events to identify the threats that could pose a risk of compromise.

Continuous or 24×7 cybersecurity monitoring through an experienced security services provider can drastically improve your threat alerts and help you spend more time on your security strategies. Here are five solid reasons you should consider 24×7 cyber security monitoring in the year ahead.  

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The Cybersecurity Landscape Has Changed Drastically

Organizations face a troubling threat landscape like never before. Global cybercrime is predicted to reach more than $2.1 trillion in 2019. You hear about new massive data breach almost monthly. The top enterprise organizations are having a tough time keeping up with the influx of threats hitting their security teams every day.  

Small and mid-size businesses are not exempt either. In fact, SMBs are the next target for cybercriminals as enterprise organizations direct more investment into cybersecurity defenses. Both enterprise and SMBs are facing an onslaught of challenges not to mention a lack of internal resources and a market for skilled cybersecurity professionals to manage everything.

Having a security partner that can monitor your environment on a 24x7x365 basis is where the market is headed. Gartner predicts that security outsourcing will be a major cybersecurity investment category in the years ahead.

Stringent Compliance & Regulatory Requirements

This year, security leaders are focused on addressing new compliance and regulatory requirements that could cost them millions in fines and penalties for non-compliance. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is among the first and most pressing new global regulation efforts to affect multinational organizations and businesses processing EU subject data. Not to mention, the United States is currently working a new bill called the Data Security and Breach Notification Act. A first-ever Federal regulation that will penalize companies that are hacked.

Nearly every country is now taking consumer data privacy and protection more seriously by introducing new legislation to hold organizations accountable. It becomes critically important that your company takes measures to reduce data compromise and put in the security controls to safeguard consumer data. That’s why continuous network and security monitoring from an experienced provider is the preferred choice for many organizations.

Grab our Guide to Enterprise Data Protection and Privacy here. 

Minimize Data Breaches

A team of experts that review security events and logs on a 24×7 basis can help you improve your Mean-Time-to-Detect (MTTD). The average MTTD, according to the 2017 Ponemon Cost of Data Breach Study, for a survey of 491 companies was 191 days with a range of 24 to 546 days. Imagine a hacker within your environment in that time frame. How much damage do you think one hacker or many could do during that time? Once a threat actor enters your environment, they can wreak havoc on systems and endpoints and eventually steal your data or hold your data at ransom.

In the same Ponemon report, hackers and criminal insiders were the cause of most data breaches. Companies in the U.S. and Canada also spend the highest amount per record at $224 and $201 per record on resolving a data breach. In the recent Equifax data breach with over 140 million records exposed, the company most likely saw a cost of more than $32 billion to resolve the issue. Not only did the company experience a financial loss because of the breach but also a negative brand and shareholder reputation.

Improve Your Mean-Time-To-Respond

The core metric for many security teams to measure their effectiveness is in Mean-Time-Detect and Mean-Time-To-Respond. Once your security team identifies or detect a threat and creates an alert, it then becomes a matter of how much time is spent on containing and remediating the threat. The MTTR in the Ponemon Cost of Data Breaches report found that the average for organizations was 66 days with a range of 10 to 164 days.

Some organizations have millions of dollars invested in firewalls, antivirus, endpoint security, and more but these technologies can generate thousands of alerts per day. This can cause your IT or security team to suffer alert fatigue. With 24×7 cyber security monitoring, your organization can greatly improve your MTTD and MTTR with the right alerts. A team of security analysts at a managed security services provider can leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI), automation, and orchestration to improve alerts and identify the events that matter.

Knowing Who Your Adversaries Are With Threat Intelligence

Data breaches that go on for months are a result of poor detection and response capabilities. Cyber attacks and breaches can happen to anyone which brings the need for around-the-clock awareness of your security environment. If you know exactly what’s happening and can sift through the noise of all your devices, you can start to make sense of what’s really happening.

Continuous monitoring paired with threat intelligence feeds can take your security detection and response capabilities to the next level. Threat intelligence in conjunction with 24×7 monitoring enables you to know exactly who your threat actors are, how they operate, and how likely they are to hack your organization.

Identifying threats as soon as possible is key in today’s threat landscape. As we you saw above, threats often go undetected and can result in serious fines or a damaged brand and shareholder reputation. A 24×7 cyber security monitoring service helps you overcome significant challenges in your network security. A highly certified security provider can become an extension of your team and help you offload the tedious task of filtering through hundreds and even thousands of alerts. Explore the benefits of managed security services in our whitepaper below.