You Can’t Shop Your Way to Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity tools and solutions have exploded in the past few years. These flashy new options can be hard to resist, but without the right foundations in place, tools offer little protection from advanced adversaries. 

How can you sort through the noise and make sure you're getting the most from your budget? By reviewing your security stack and baselining it against a proven reference architecture, you can identify the right blend of products and support structures for your program. Let’s take a deeper look.

Remember when you only needed a handful of tools to get the job done? It seems that with every new threat, there’s a new feature, a new solution, or a new vendor for your security stack—which grows every year, stretching budgets, people, and patience. Often vendors are competing for every inch of your security stack regardless of whether it’s their core focus or not—all to boost revenue.

Compounding this situation is the fact that every new tool requires service contracts, training, implementation, configuration, and technical support—leaving your already time-squeezed staff with even fewer hours to manage products effectively. You could cover your talent, time, and security gaps with Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs), but this path creates its own risks. There are no guarantees on the quality of the personnel, their training, or the sophistication and efficacy of tools on offer. Many MSSPs suffer from the same talent shortage, alert fatigue, and false positives that plague the very customers they’re supposed to help!

And even with all these “secure” tools and options, we are still failing to stop the adversary. Breaches, ransomware, and threats to business availability continue to increase and evolve in sophistication year-over-year.

The bottom line is that the size and contents of your security shopping cart simply do not matter if you don’t have:

• Qualified people to run them
• A well-defined security stack strategy
• A plan to referee the stack wars in your environment
• A view of your return on investment

No amount of “Vendor Loyalty Reward Points” is ever going to secure your organization and you will never be able to cash them in. So do your budget a favor—instead of spending indiscriminately:

1. Take control of your security technology architecture. Define the ecosystem and stop buying products unless you have people who can maintain them. Our recommendation is to implement six tools really well rather than 50+ tools poorly. If you don’t know what those six tools should be, ask us. It’s time to walk away from the exhibit hall and get back to basics.
   
   
2. Stop paying for commercial off-the-shelf products. With just a few software developers (who will pay for themselves in no time) and some basic scripts, you can effectively architect security yourself. So don’t look for external products if you can fix the problem with internal resources.
   
   
3. Eliminate duplication. Reward companies that offer open-extensible products, and make them compete on performance—not black-box, vendor-lock-in approaches that hold you and your data hostage. If you have ever had that sinking feeling when you realize you can only access your data through a vendor portal and only with their staff, you’ve been in this miserable situation. Don’t fall for that again.
   
   
4. Realize the strengths and weaknesses of your vendor solutions. Just because a vendor can do something for you doesn’t mean that they should.  For example, those “free” add-ons are not free when you consider the cost of having second-tier solutions in line. Get clear on what you really need and from whom—and if you can’t do that yourself, get assistance.

We know that building a sophisticated defense-in-depth cybersecurity capability requires an extremely complex model of the right people, processes, and technology. It’s hard. But it’s easier with Booz Allen’s cyber expertise and experience, which enable us to understand your organization’s unique environment and challenges—and recommend what will work best. Given the time, effort, and resources needed to make tools work right out of the box, leading companies look to us to effectively craft an integrated cyber solution, select the right tools, and optimize their existing tool set. Booz Allen Cyber Solutions range from consulting to managed services. Here are three ways we can help you right now:

1. Security Stack Review: Booz Allen can assess your current technology portfolio, assess gaps, and make recommendations to streamline operations and plug holes.
   
   
2. Reference Architecture Design and Implementation: By baselining your stack against a proven reference architecture, we can help you design and implement the security stack that is most appropriate for your organization.
   
   
3.  Compromise Assessments: We can identify evidence of an active or recent security breach in your environment by combining industry-leading network and endpoint detection with threat hunting performed by the National Security Agency’s (NSA) Certifi­ed Incident Response Assistance (CIRA)-accredited analysts.

Regardless of which service you choose, Booz Allen professionals know what it means to be in the fight. We’ve worked as incident responders, computer forensics experts, malware reverse engineers, journalists, anti-fraud specialists, private investigators, lawyers, and former law-enforcement professionals. And we’re here for you.

The days of purchasing random tools, plugging them together, and expecting effective security are gone. Booz Allen provides the industry expertise and experience required to protect you from the most sophisticated cyber threats. How can we help?