The Keynote sessions here at RSA 2013 kicked off yesterday and Art Coviello, RSA Executive Chairman, focused on the importance of big data and the opportunities that it presents security teams from an intelligence perspective. He’s right, the opportunities are tremendous and customers are anxious to better leverage “big data” but documented and repeatable process along with baseline implementation of critical controls are prerequisites for taking advantage of “big data”.
The actionable intelligence that can be gained from big data is only useful if it causes an organization to take the RIGHT actions in the correct sequence with measurable outcomes. Conceptually leveraging big data makes perfect sense but the implementation will yield more of the same firefighting that bogs down security organizations today if it’s not part of a documented strategy with measurable outcomes enabled by rigorous process and a thorough understanding of the controls you currently have in place.
The actionable intelligence that big data can provide could very well enable an organization to quickly and efficiently mitigate an attack by correlating unstructured data in a context that directs an SoC analyst to take appropriate action. Attack mitigated, the good guys win right? Maybe not…are we really still just addressing the symptoms and not the root cause? The attack is a result of a vulnerability that was exploited and resources are being expended on the incident response because resources were not expended on preventative maintenance. Perhaps if the control to prevent the attack in the first place had been documented, implemented and measured the attack would never have happened.
I realize that implementing critical controls won’t stop every attack but there is such a great opportunity to do some fundamental and meaningful work around implementing critical controls to stop attacks that get overlooked.
It’s just good hygiene. Would rather brush your teeth, floss and get regular dental examinations or be really good at getting fillings?