Are you really still managing your security incidents within ITSM...?

IT and Security collaboration is imperative to preventing and responding to threats. Challenges face both IT and security teams: usually businesses will have an inability to prioritise potential vulnerabilities within their processes, or simply choose not to. If they do want to place a focus on a SecOps strategy, organisations are often working with manual and delayed incident response processes – using email and spreadsheets means important incidents slip through the cracks, and ultimately teams aren’t aware that they’ve become vulnerable.

It mostly takes a serious hack or data breach for businesses to invest in SecOps – in which case they will probably end up spending more to rectify the problem than if they had prioritised SecOps in the first place. This blog will talk you through why you should choose ServiceNow for your SecOps strategy, and the capabilities it offers to protect your business against cyber attacks.

Why managing security within ITSM is a bad idea

A common misconception within organisations is that they think in order to utilise their ITSM investment, they should use it to manage their security incident processes as well. While it may be tempting to fall into this trap, security incident management is a completely different ballpark and thus requires a separate approach altogether. 

Security incidents are different from normal incidents. For the latter, CI/service availability is addressed, whereas the main goal with security incidents is to manage the affected confidentiality and integrity aspects of a CI, asset or service. 

Managing security incidents today can often be overwhelming, as security tools will commonly be in disconnected silos with a ridiculous amount of different notifications, events and incidents. ServiceNow’s Security Operations package contains applications – Security Incident Response (SIR), Vulnerability Response (VR), Threat Intelligence (TI) and Configuration Compliance that make up a specialised tool specifically to address this issue.

Why choose ServiceNow for SecOps

ServiceNow SecOps provides a full-stack framework for your business to handle your security tasks as productively as possible, offering a modern and agile approach to protecting your business and the people within it. 

This product includes several capabilities that will assist your IT and security teams in reacting fast and efficiently to security incidents. It will allow your stakeholders to gain real-time visibility, prioritise based on the level of risk and track performance across your whole organisation.

• Gain insights in real time 

  • A centralised view and common data model will provide you with the context you need to assess your security posture in actual time. 

• Easily prioritise based on business risk 

  • This will allow your teams to assign vulnerabilities and incidents based on what matters most to the business and how crucial each of them are. You can clearly see where you’re most vulnerable, and what should be actioned first. 

• Collaborative workflows 

  • These work using automation and AI, so the risk of human error is diminished. You can scale your teams faster and smarter with workflows covering both security, IT and the rest of your business. 

• Reduce siloes 

  • By leveraging the advantage of using the same platform, Security Incident Response Teams (SIRT) can engage resolvers in the Incident Response and Vulnerability Remediation processes whilst still maintaining confidentiality. This prevents separate teams from turning into silos. 

• Monitor performance enterprise-wide 

  • The Performance Analytics feature comes into play here, by tracking and reporting on all workflows and processes across the organisation. This application will track individual analyst efficacy, too, so your analysis is as thorough as can be. 

The ServiceNow platform is the best in-class solution for Security Operations throughout your business, not just within the IT and security teams. The workflow engine is extremely powerful, integrating with your ecosystem to give you full awareness and control of all the risk, controls and compliance for every department.

Risks of neglecting a good SecOps strategy

The money it takes to rectify a data breach or cyber-attack will usually be several times the cost it takes to protect yourself in the first place. The direct losses realised by a cyber-attack can, in serious cases, be astronomical – there’s also reputational damage to think about.

Why SecOps is imperative to have

The importance of SecOps is often overlooked within an organisation’s priorities, but ironically is what will cause the most damage if left ignored. With scammers and cyber criminals becoming more inventive every day, having a stable security network in place will ensure you’re as prepared as possible to avoid – and if not, effectively deal with - an attack. 

Investing in a SecOps framework is to ensure your management’s buy-in and commitment to improving security across your entire business. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that security is only the concern of the IT team, because it really does impact everyone enterprise-wide. The aim is to establish cross-team collaboration, with security measures firmly embedded into the software development lifecycle, and create increased visibility into your current infrastructure.

How Unifii come in

Unifii’s dedicated Security Operations team has a proven track record of successful implementations of all products within the ServiceNow SecOps suite – both big and small. Our team members have extensive cyber security backgrounds and are very well versed in the subject area, meaning we can help you plan and kickstart your security tooling across the wider picture.

For more information surrounding Unifii’s approach to SecOps and a free consultation on your business needs, please get in touch with one of the team here.