Prevention or cure? Focusing your cybersecurity efforts

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, so the saying goes. When it comes to protecting your organisation against the imminent threat of a cyber attack, it’s essential to factor in both. Here’s why.

Today’s hackers are motivated and more organised than ever. This past year has shown how vulnerable organisations of all sizes are.

The headlines in the wake of WannaCry, Petya/NotPetya, and more recently, Bad Rabbit, among other targeted breaches make a strong case for ramping up your organisation’s information security to ensure both business continuity and building customer confidence. While the obvious answer may be to boost your CIO’s resources, there also is the matter of a global cyber skills shortage.

Security breadth

Simply identifying new and evolving threats is a huge job. Cisco Talos, for example, is staffed by over 300 full-time threat researchers who work in collaboration with data scientists and engineers. They use 1,100+ decoy systems and threat traps and millions of telemetry agents to collect information about existing and developing threats.

A sophisticated operation like Talos can’t easily be replicated by most businesses. That’s why thousands of customers trust us to protect their Cisco products and subscribe to our security services. We also supply our insights and expertise to the global information security community.

Identifying threats is only the start though. Applying the latest knowledge and capabilities requires continual focus. In-house infosec teams now are tasked with much more than standard operations management. They must respond to hundreds or thousands of daily alerts all while wrangling with new technology and regulations.

An ounce of prevention

Cisco Services works with customers across public and private sectors to thoroughly prepare them in the event of a cyber attack. Our Incident Response service provides proactive support to adopt a threat-centric design and mind-set, and emergency response when customers need it most.

Using our ‘defense in-depth’ approach, our security specialists team with customers’ in-house infosec teams to help them assess their incident response readiness, test their processes with tabletop exercises, and provide proactive threat hunting to see if a breach has occurred. We provide clear and thorough recommendations on how to improve their response procedures, acquire the right tools, and communicate accurately in the event a breach occurs.

With a proactive approach, our customers gain peace of mind that their architecture and controls create a strong layer of defence while improving their response capabilities.

Our video demo shows how Incident Response works.

A pound of cure

In the event of an emergency, Cisco’s security specialists can be on-site within 24 hours to provide customers with a clear path for ending a cyber attack, get operations back up and running, and minimise damage.

Every organisation, large or small, is a potential target for cyber attackers. There is good news for the proactive company. In the event of an attack, the impact and lasting effects will be less severe than for those who have neglected preventive measures.