5 SecOps Challenges and How to Overcome Them
With almost daily reports of data breaches, many companies are seeking a new approach to security. SecOps, or security operations, is a collaboration between information security and IT operations teams to keep a company’s data secure and reduce risk, all while continuing to achieve business goals.
Ideally, SecOps can help address vulnerabilities before software release while maintaining agile timelines. However, it can be difficult to put into practice.
Here are five of the main challenges you should address to ensure your SecOps implementation is successful.
1. Resistance to change
SecOps often entails significant changes to processes and responsibilities. Traditional team siloing means that skill sets aren’t shared and processes aren’t familiar. It is often tempting for team members to perform tasks themselves rather than explain to others how to do them. This resistance prevents collaboration and the adoption of SecOps principles.
It’s important to devote time to training and promote skill-sharing between team members. You need to create a cultural change, not just a process change.
2. Lack of established processes
Previously separate teams use unique processes and tools that don’t always integrate with those of other roles. Teams come in with different priorities for speed, security, and efficiency. These priorities define existing processes and often must be reworked if teams are to collaborate.
You should take time to clarify why processes and tools are used and how changes can impact productivity and functionality. You need to find ways to overlap tools and processes to maximally accommodate each team’s needs and functions.
3. Unrealistic goals
When you first adopt SecOps, there is a learning curve as processes are refined and people learn to work together. During this period productivity is likely to drop. If you have not adjusted your goals and performance measures accordingly, the results can seem alarming.
Evaluate the agile metrics you are using and ensure that you’re benchmarking realistic expectations. Remember to view metrics as only part of the larger picture. Treat them as a tool for guiding improvement, not punishment.
4. Tight deadlines
Security monitoring, testing, and analysis are time-consuming, particularly when done by non- security experts. As responsibilities and expectations change, it can be difficult to keep teams in sync and meet established deadlines.
When possible, use automation to streamline testing, speed analysis, and incident response. Integrate security and development or operations tools when possible to condense processes. For example, you can include SAST tools with CI/CD pipelines to identify vulnerabilities as code is written.
5. Large amounts of data
An abundance of log data and system alerts are difficult to analyze, especially if not centralized. Additionally, data formats don’t always align, making analysis more difficult.
Use SIEM solutions to correlate and centralize data. When combined with UEBA, these solutions can be configured to carefully filter data. You can often automate these solutions to respond to low-level alerts, freeing security personnel to focus on more complex issues.
A SecOps enterprise can be challenging to implement, but it’s worth the time and effort to increase your overall security.
