Comprehensive Visibility Lays the Foundation for Cyber Resilience

It’s essential for UK central government departments to sustain normal operations when cyber security incidents threaten to disrupt systems, data, or hardware. From health and social care to transport, business, and energy, robust resilience facilitates the administrative, day-to-day oversight of and public trust in the critical economic functions that society depends on, even in the face of diverse modern cyber threats. This article outlines how comprehensive visibility into assets and data flows lays the foundation for strengthening cyber resilience at the central government level.

The second pillar of the UK’s National Cyber Strategy points out how, “first, the nature of the risk needs to be understood” in order to improve cyber resilience. The task of understanding cyber risk within government departments is more challenging than ever given the increased digitisation of services, legacy IT issues, application sprawl, access management, and complex data flows. Here’s how comprehensive visibility helps central government departments to better understand cyber risk and improve cyber resilience.

1) Holistic Risk Identification Facilitates Effective Controls 

Silos are bad news for effectively understanding the nature of risks and mitigating them. These silos emerge from the complex interplay of systems, tools, data flows, and services within and between different organisational units. Assets and the role they play within a larger government IT ecosystem get unaccounted for, which results in risk identification and management gaps. It’s only by understanding risks fully that government departments can put in place the controls required for increased cyber resilience.

Comprehensive visibility into the assets held and operated within government IT environments enables holistic risk identification that fully accounts for technology, data, people, and processes. This visibility, which comes from asset discovery tools and approaches, ensures cyber security risks don’t go unrecognised and unmanaged.

When central government departments know exactly what digital assets they own, how they are configured; or in the case of data assets, where/how they are stored and with whom they are shared, it’s simpler to identify weaknesses and put in place appropriate controls that secure these assets to prevent and resist compromises from cyber attacks.

2) More Effective Threat Detection and Response

A holistic oversight of risks doesn’t guarantee immunity from the threat of cyber attacks on government departments. After all, people can make mistakes, unknown vulnerabilities can emerge, and malicious actors deploy a significant arsenal of sophisticated tools and techniques to infiltrate IT environments.

A necessity for cyber resilience is the ability to minimise the impact of any cyber attacks that do happen so that central government functions don’t face serious disruptions in daily activities. When the oversight of IT assets and their risk profiles is holistic rather than siloed, this creates an environment that encourages transparency, monitoring, timely information sharing, and collaboration.

For threat detection, comprehensive visibility enables the effective monitoring of all systems, networks, and services for security events. This visibility facilitates swift threat detection at scale so that events are discovered and risks mitigated before they impact government functions.

When events become security incidents, central government departments need the ability to triage cyber security incidents, rapidly assess their potential impact, and respond appropriately. The contribution of visibility here is that holistic risk understanding enables effective triage and response actions based on the threat and the importance of the systems, data, or other assets to the overall operations of the department.

Tools for Improved Visibility

Technological solutions have a critical role to play in achieving comprehensive visibility into assets, risks, and security events at the scale and with the level of automation required in central government departments. Here are several types of security tools that improve visibility and help to enhance cyber resilience.

Asset discovery 

Automated asset discovery solutions scan a network for new, existing, and changing IT assets. As cloud adoption and virtualisation increase, it’s critical to procure solutions that work across on-premise and cloud/virtual environments.

SIEM 

Advanced threat detection sometimes requires the investigation of logs from applications, systems, and devices. Discovering all of these assets is a good start, but government departments should consider a SIEM solution that aggregates, analyzes, and correlates log data from disparate sources for threat detection.

Vulnerability assessment 

Protecting against cyber attacks at any level calls for effective vulnerability management. Dedicated vulnerability assessment solutions can augment a vulnerability management programme by automating the identification, evaluation, and management of vulnerabilities. 

Attack surface monitoring 

Attack surface monitoring solutions enable holistic monitoring of vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and misconfigurations in any catalogued IT asset. These tools scan infrastructure, hosts, cloud-based services, privileged accounts, and more for new potential points of entry that government departments can then swiftly mitigate against.

Visibility Equals A More Resilient Government

By combining tools, processes, and frameworks, central government departments can get full visibility into their IT assets. Visibility fosters improved cyber resilience by understanding risks holistically, facilitating appropriate controls that harden assets against common attacks, and refining detection and response capabilities for greater resistance against cyber security incidents that inevitably will occur within complex environments. Cyber resilience at the national level sets an example and builds resilience among organisations and commercial businesses for a more secure, functional, and prosperous digital UK.

Cyber maturity is more of a journey than a destination because there are always ways to improve. It’s also not exactly straightforward to assess current cyber maturity levels and develop a roadmap for improvement from a subjective perspective. Partnering with a cyber security consultancy or managed service can provide a fresh view and ensure that the organisation understands their cyber maturity and make changes that strengthen resilience.

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