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Overcoming Findings Overload

Overcoming Findings Overload

Tim Sullivan

5/24/2023

   3 min read

Tim Sullivan

05/24/23

   3 min read

“I have 85,000+ findings! And they’re all in one bucket! How do I sift through my findings and prioritize them to protect my hybrid cloud environment? Where do I even start?” – CISO of a large enterprise.

The sheer number of security and compliance findings in hybrid cloud environments today can overwhelm CISOs and their teams. With limited resources and personnel, it is only possible to address some findings immediately, potentially leading to a massive backlog of issues. As a result, CISOs and their security teams need help to keep pace with the increasing number of security and compliance findings and need help understanding which findings must be prioritized and remediated first.

Key factors leading to ‘Findings Overload’

Caveonix’s research team has identified four factors that exacerbate the findings overload problem:

  1. Assets per application in the cloud are 50-100x the number of assets you would see for the same application in a traditional software-defined data center environment. Just achieving basic visibility in the cloud requires scale that legacy monitoring tools lack.
  2. This asset number will only increase as the number grows of new cloud-native services from the hyperscalers.
  3. A growing asset base with the same incidence of vulnerabilities/misconfigurations ipso facto creates an explosion of findings.
  4. The DevOps process only exacerbates the problem by accelerating the introduction of potential vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.
Detecting, prioritizing, and remediating high-criticality findings is a daunting task. Managing such a large amount of findings can be overwhelming, and acquiring more resources to handle the task can be expensive and not scalable in the long run. The demands of the digital customer often outpace the security team’s ability to keep up with software and application development.

Furthermore, the gap in cybersecurity skills and the need for more training in the industry to meet advanced security and compliance needs further compound this problem.

AI-driven risk assessment, prioritization, and automation technologies can scale to meet the size of the ‘findings overload’ problem. Risk prioritization allows the security and remediation teams to focus on the risks that matter. AI-based engines can be configured to mitigate specific simple issues automatically, allowing security team resources to tackle the more complicated problems.

How to Overcome Findings Overload

There are three main approaches to dealing with Findings Overload:

  1. Accept the risk and maintain the status quo. Most boards of directors would not accept this risk management approach. It opens the enterprise to hacks, fines, shareholder lawsuits, and activists. It puts the directors themselves at risk of job loss.
  2. Throw more human resources at the problem. This is the antithesis of a scalable solution to the problem. It’s just not a good business approach.
  3. Leverage a security platform that enables risk prioritization and automation. Organizations can effectively tackle findings overload by leveraging a security platform that enables risk prioritization and automation. Such a platform automates processes, prioritizes risks, and optimizes resource allocation.

Five Ways Caveonix Can Help

With Caveonix, you can effectively manage findings overload and strengthen your security and compliance posture. The platform’s comprehensive visibility, risk prioritization, automation, and collaboration capabilities provide the foundation for efficient and effective findings management. Some of the specific ways Caveonix helps are:

1.    Shift-Left of Compliance and Security

With Caveonix, you can effectively manage findings overload and strengthen your security and compliance posture. The platform’s comprehensive visibility, risk prioritization, automation, and collaboration capabilities provide the foundation for efficient and effective findings management. Some of the specific ways Caveonix helps are:

2.  Application Awareness
Two different applications may have different business impact to the enterprise. Therefore, the same finding in two different applications may represent two different levels of risk to the enterprise. It’s important to be able to quickly locate where the biggest risks are in the enterprise and to attribute the mitigation of that risk to the appropriate application risk managers. Application awareness is the key to risk attribution. Risk attribution is the key to prioritization and action. The Caveonix platform enables instantaneous and continuous application awareness by associating every cloud asset and all its findings with the application to which it belongs. Overall risk can be “rolled up” from application to organization and compared across organizations.
3.  Risk Prioritization
The Pareto Principle, named after economist Vilfredo Pareto, specifies that 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes, asserting an unequal relationship between inputs and outputs. This principle serves as a general reminder that the relationship between inputs and outputs is not balanced. At Caveonix, we apply Pareto optimality to the prioritization of risk. All risk scores are quantitative and transformed from their base score by a variety of factors such as Business Impact Analysis, location within the enterprise, attack path, compensatory controls etc. The result of our analysis is an action plan: if you have 100 remediations to do, we identify for you the first 20 that give you the most “bang for the buck” and tell you by how much it will reduce your security risk or improve your compliance posture.
4.   Findings Management
Enterprises today typically receive the results of a regular vulnerability/configuration scan in the form of a spreadsheet. Beyond the fact that they have no application awareness or risk prioritization, these spreadsheets must be continually revalidated for the status of findings. For example, are we dealing with the same false positive again? Security personnel may receive the scan on Monday. But, they’re not ready to take action until Friday after they have re-validated the findings. Caveonix Findings Management enables managers to classify findings by false positives, exemptions, compensatory controls, or those you need to act on. Every finding receives a unique identifier, which maintains state across scans. No time is wasted re-validating alerts. You can immediately get to those that require action and send them to Jira, ServiceNow, or your SOAR solution. With two-way integration, when you close out the alert in your IT Service Management platform, it automatically closes out in Caveonix.
5.    Auto-remediation
AI powers Caveonix’s DefenseBot™ technology which utilizes Robotic Process Automation (RPA). It can automatically fix configuration settings, mitigate findings, and help avoid compliance drift. This significantly reduces Mean Time to Remediation (MTTR), with exposure windows often less than 30 seconds to prevent the exploitation of critical risks. DefenseBot™ seamlessly integrates with CI/CD pipelines for real-time detection and auto-remediation during pre-deployment.

Caveonix’s platform enables proactive and detailed risk prioritization with context-rich information and thorough, actionable insights. See what it can do for you today.

 

Book a demo to explore how Caveonix can help your organization effectively manage risk.