Breaking Down Enterprise Silos: Improving Protection
In today’s world, as networks become increasingly specialized and diverse, the need for specialization also comes into play. Teams such as security operations center (SOC), cloud operations, network, and operational technology (OT) teams — each with specific tools and specialized knowledge — are tasked with ensuring the security of their respective environments. However, the inconsistent capabilities, nomenclature, constructs, and data available to each team creates silos that makes it incredibly difficult to get a big picture view of what is happening.
As a result, it becomes challenging to improve protection, maintain compliance, and optimize performance, among other things. Additionally, since a different dialect is used to describe the available data, it becomes increasingly challenging to collaborate to protect these environments. So, how can these teams work together to improve protection, maintain compliance, and optimize performance?
Finding a Common Language
The first step in breaking down silos between teamwork is to find a common language that these teams can use. This language should be understandable by all teams and used to define a one-tool approach. Different teams can share information without having to translate back and forth, resulting in the capabilities they need to protect their specific environments. This language should act as a common root language but with different dialects.
Several tools empower each team to do their job and collaborate with other teams. However, as the network becomes diverse and dispersed, getting these teams to collaborate via one-tool tool becomes increasingly challenging. Each team has its own unique tool that they know inside and out, but the crossover value with the other teams is limited. To address this gap, the available tools can also help teams from different backgrounds to collaborate to improve protection and maintain compliance. This can be achieved by sharing tools that they all know how to use, which eliminates the need to know the uber details of the different environments in which each team operates.
Adding context for greater understanding
The next step is to incorporate context by using common keywords or labels that everyone understands. Although the teams may use the tool very differently from the others, having one language enriched with organizational context can be the glue that brings all teams together. Common labels applied to standardized data creates corporate knowledge that the teams can share. Teams can then search for and pull up the information they need using the same tool and the same language. They don’t have to understand what something means in their AWS cloud tools versus their Azure cloud tools versus their OT systems and their IT systems. This translation is done for them.
With this approach, everyone can get a visualization of what they’ve got, what it’s doing, and what’s happening across environments. They can get to the same meaning much faster and move quickly to do the needful to protect the organization.
Advice
Clearly, breaking down enterprise silos is essential in improving protection, maintaining compliance, and optimizing performance. To achieve this goal, teams must find a common language and use the same tool. Teams need to incorporate context using common words to create one language enriched with organizational context.
As discussed, security operations center (SOC) analysts, the network team, cloud operations team, and the operational technology (OT) teams can use the tool differently to detect threats, misconfigurations in new services, pathways, devices, and users. When breaking down silos, everyone has a good visualization of what is happening across different clouds and their OT environment.
Overall, it’s time to break down silos and find a common language and tool for teams to work together to improve protection, maintain compliance, and optimize performance. Since this approach requires interdisciplinary collaboration, it’ll lead to the development of more holistic solutions that go beyond the scope of individual teams.
About the Author
Matt Wilson is the Vice President of Product Management at Netography. With a rich background in innovation and go-to-market strategies, Matt has been a critical leader in helping many companies conceptualize solutions from the customer lens and drive them to market with significant impact. Over his 25+ year career, Matt has held senior technology leadership positions across numerous industries, including Neustar, Verisign, and Prolexic Technologies.
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