How to Select an Adaptive Security Platform for Your Needs

If you hang around the IT world long enough, you’ll hear someone say, “This is not your father’s firewall” or router, or server… We have to update this idea for today’s dizzying rate of change in technology and cybersecurity. Now, it would be more like, “This is not your twin brother’s firewall.” Security managers face pressure to adapt quickly as big changes like remote work and the widespread embrace of SaaS force changes in security policy and strategy. This is the problem that adaptive security seeks to solve.

Adaptive security, as its name suggests, is an approach to cybersecurity that dynamically predicts threats and rapidly adapts to them—enabling better security outcomes by making threat prevention and incident response more able to handle the latest modes of attack. The security sector is responding favorably to the idea of adaptive security. One industry study, for example, predicts that the market for adaptive security products will reach $27 billion by 2029.

An Adaptive Security Platform (ASP) delivers adaptive security functionality. It uses real-time monitoring and analysis to adjust security policies and enforcement automatically in response to evolving threats. This article discusses how ASPs work. It examines why an Adaptive Security Platform is a wise investment and what makes for an effective solution.

What is Adaptive Security?

Adaptive security is, first and foremost, an approach to security. It’s not a product, per se. Rather, it’s a model, an architecture, and a set of ideas that ASPs bring to life. “Adaptive” is the key word here. An ASP helps the security operations center (SOC) adapt quickly to the newest threats. It achieves this goal by automatically and continuously monitoring user behavior and other activities across the entire attack surface, uncovering vulnerabilities, anomalies, and malicious traffic.

The ASP’s real time monitoring and user behavioral analytics enables the SOC to stop threats from becoming attacks. Getting there may involve predictive analytics and root cause analysis. The ASP then informs policy definition and enforcement, along with the nature of your countermeasures, so your security toolset can adapt continuously to newly perceived threats.

Adaptive security is a necessary evolution away from traditional approaches to security. It’s not as simple as a “before vs. after” story, but adaptive security imbues security with greater flexibility and dynamism than was previously available. The old approach to security focused on perimeter defenses, signature-based threat detection, and a generally siloed “small picture” view of the security landscape, e.g., data security, email security, network security, and so forth, instead of an overall risk mitigation strategy.

Many organizations have pursued adaptive modes of security even if they have not implemented an ASP or fully embraced the adaptive security approach. Companies that deploy endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions, for instance, are taking an adaptive approach to endpoint security.

What Is an Adaptive Security Platform and Why Do You Need One?

An adaptive security platform operationalizes the four core elements of an adaptive security strategy:

• Predict—Assessing and prioritizing risk exposure, driving changes in security posture by anticipating attacks across the full IT estate, including the cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
• Prevent—Dynamically defining and enforcing security policies that harden and isolate systems, preventing attacks in the process.
• Detect—Continuously monitoring users, systems, system activity, payloads, and network traffic to discover threats, incipient attacks, and attacks in progress.
• Respond—Containing and quickly remediating security incidents.

These four elements reinforce each other and operate in a mode of continuous updating and evolution. Data from prediction informs prevention, which informs detection, and so forth.

Why would you need an ASP? The main reason is that cybersecurity teams have had to adapt to rapid and simultaneous changes in the threat environment, business strategy, and employee behaviors. Consider that businesses started pursuing digital transformation strategies just as almost everyone was forced to work from home during COVID. At the same time, a great deal of IT moved off premises and into the cloud and SaaS environments.

While these changes were affecting security policies and operations, malicious actors have been busy coming up with increasingly dangerous and sophisticated threats. These include zero days, advanced persistent threats (APTs), and spear phishing, among many others. It’s been a difficult collection of forces to confront.

Just as businesses were changing the way they operated and freeing employees to work from home on personal devices, security teams were contending with a flood of serious threat vectors. This translates into a variety of novel risk scenarios. An employee accessing a SaaS app on a personal device through a home internet connection, for example, has the potential to put sensitive data at risk without anyone knowing about it. In this environment, an ASP starts to become mandatory.

An ASP mitigates risk as it enables the kind of digital agility businesses need to remain competitive. Other benefits include improved security outcomes through real time threat detection, a reduction in the attack surface, and a better user experience. Cyber defense can become proactive, versus reactive.

How to Select an Adaptive Security Platform for Your Needs

What should you pay attention to when selecting an adaptive security platform? There’s a lot to do here because adaptive security, by its nature, encompasses the complete spectrum of issues that arise in cybersecurity and digital business strategy. Here are seven steps to consider when selecting an ASP.

# 1—Consider Your Needs and Environment
What do you need from an ASP? An informed procurement decision needs to come from a careful assessment of your IT estate. This should include your on-premises digital assets and infrastructure, but also your cloud environments, SaaS apps, and third-party connections, e.g., API-based integrations with external companies. And, you should factor in how your end users expect to interact with the IT estate, and where they work. From this assessment emerges a total picture of what you have to defend. That’s your maximum ASP footprint.

Then, look at your threat landscape. What are the most serious threats you face? And, which of your assets need the most protection? If the maximum ASP footprint represents the most extensive deployment of the ASP, the threat assessment should narrow the scope so you can deploy the platform in the most impactful way possible.

At the same time, it’s a good idea to think through your overall business plans and examine how they affect your conception of an ASP. For example, if you’re on the verge of abolishing bring-your-own-device (BYOD) or work-from-home policies, that should change your plans for ASP implementation. Similarly, if you’re planning to phase in a big digital transformation that spreads your data across multiple cloud and SaaS instances, as well as third party kiosks and retail stores, that again should influence how you’re thinking about an ASP.

#2—Align with What You Already Have
It’s likely that you already have some elements of adaptive security at work in your environment. If you’re using an extended detection and response (XDR) solution, for instance, you may find that it is providing an adaptive security methodology to the areas of your IT estate that it covers. You may decide to phase out XDR and replace it with an ASP, but it might be smart to leave it alone and modify your ASP deployment instead.

#3—Maintain a Policy and Organizational Focus
An ASP must be a manifestation of security strategies and policies that fit within a specific organization context. It creates an adaptive security capability in service of security policies. Its functions and outputs will be relevant to people in distinct areas of the organization, such as the SOC or the compliance department. It’s a good idea to think through the policies and organizational aspects of the ASP when you’re evaluating your options.

#4—Pay Attention to Unintended Consequences
An ASP, like any broad-scoped and complex piece of technology, has the potential to create unintended consequences. For instance, will it create integrations that you will then have to support? If it requires the deployment of software agents, will those affect performance or create support headaches? Remember, too, that any platform you deploy will require at least one person (or partial person) to administer.

#5—Match Platform Capabilities to Your Requirements
With all of these factors in focus, you can now turn the platform’s actual capabilities. Evaluate how well the ASP succeeds or falls short on multiple fronts, including:

• Data protection mechanisms—How well does the ASP cover data assets? Like, does it continuously monitor data access requests and detect anomalous activities in databases?   
• API security—APIs represent a significant attack surface, one that can let malicious actors directly into your most sensitive digital assets. For this reason, an ASP’s API security capabilities, e.g., the ability to monitor API behavior or integrate with API security solutions, should have a high priority in selecting an ASP.
• User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA)—Anomalous end user behavior can signify the start of a cyberattack, so UEBA functionality, or the ability to integrate with a UEBA solution, is important in an ASP.
• Support for Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA)—If you’re like many organizations, you are probably embarking on a ZTA project, or have already done one. An ASP should be able to monitor network access requests, device verifications, and other elements of a ZTA.
• SIEM and SOAR integration—An ASP must be able to ingest data from security incident and event management (SIEM) systems. That’s part of the ASP’s continuous monitoring function. As incidents occur, the ASP must then integrate with a security orchestration and automated response (SOAR) solution so it can influence the incident response process.
• Logging, reporting, and forensics—The right ASP will provide you with rich logging and reporting outputs. You will need this information, along with forensics on security incidents, to realize the technology’s potential for continuous adaptation.
• SaaS security—SaaS apps represent a potentially dangerous blind spot for security managers. Often holding sensitive data, they may operate outside the view of traditional security monitoring tools. An ASP will ideally support SaaS security or integrate with a SaaS security platform. Suridata, for example, takes the principles of an ASP and applies them to securing SaaS applications. It helps organizations adapt their security measures to the dynamic nature of cloud-based software and the ever-evolving threat landscape in the SaaS world. Specifically, Suridata can perform dynamic risk assessment across the multi-app SaaS environment, monitor user behavior and third-party integrations, and check security configurations.

#6—Evaluate the Scalability of Security Policies 
The ASP has to scale your security policies as your IT estate grows and changes in accordance with shifts in business strategy. It cannot be rigid, and this is, believe it or not, a problem with some ASPs. It has to be highly adaptable to change.

#7—Analyze the ML and AI Capabilities 
An ASP will have some artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities. The question to ask, though, is how they work. AI and ML should not be a “black box.” Rather, you should understand how they “train,” the functional areas of the ASP they affect, and so forth.

Getting to Adaptive Security

Adaptive security is necessary today because the combination of increasingly agile business strategies and serious cyberthreats are making traditional forms of cybersecurity less effective at protecting digital assets. An ASP continuously monitors the cybersecurity environment and enables it to adapt rapidly to changes in threats and the IT estate.

The shift to cloud computing and SaaS may require the use of solutions like Suridata. It offers the adaptability enterprises need as their SaaS environments expand.

To learn more, visit https://suridata.ai or the company’s demo page.