Continuous security monitoring planning can save your organization from many headaches and secure its future; however, continuous compliance does not equal security. Robust enterprise security is a strong differentiator in today’s evolving threat landscape. It is safe to say that if you don’t cultivate a formidable defense strategy, risks and threats will eventually bypass your organization’s notice.
An enterprise security monitoring tool will align your IT workflows with your business goals. It creates a firm framework, defends critical assets, and identifies elements that could negatively impact your systems, data, and users. Good enterprise security provides data confidentiality, integrity, and availability, which we know as the CIA triad.
Let’s go over the basics of enterprise security monitoring and have a complete rundown.
Did you know? In 2023 alone, enterprises had to deal with over 2,365 attacks! They experienced a 72% hike in data breaches since 2021, which was an all-time record high!
What is Enterprise Security Monitoring?
It takes a matter of months to go out of business once you experience a data breach.
An average data breach costs a public company USD 4.88 million in 2024; 94% of enterprises experience email security incidents and malware is the most common reason behind data breaches. Hackers use deceptive tactics to hijack systems and target low-profile personnel as well.
Cyber adversaries band in groups to paralyze school systems, hospitals, and individual private sector entities. The costliest crimes are tracked by the IC3 and hackers pose as tech support groups to get users to trust them.
The enterprise security approach uses a mix of Intrusion Detection Solutions (IDS), Threat Intelligence Platforms, and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems to detect and respond to security episodes in real-time.
The Need for Enterprise Security Monitoring
Today’s organizations are taking an intelligence-driven and threat-focused approach to enterprise security. Ransomware attacks have doubled up in the healthcare sector within the last year. We’ve seen an increase in the number of dark web leaks and cyber attacks have increased by more than 50% in defense and government, agriculture, transportation, and energy sectors.
The top five variants companies are currently worried about are – LockBit, Black Basta, Play, ALPHV/BlackCat, and CI0P. With the explosion of IoT, remote tools, cloud, and mobile, consumers and business owners embrace new changes in the ways they use emerging technologies. AWS wasn’t careful and it saw as many as 2.3 terabits per second of malicious data invade its servers. It is said to be one of the largest data breaches in history to date. Some of the largest DDoS attacks are launched against companies that provide online services.
So if you have a digital presence, your company is most certainly at risk. No organization is safe, which is why enterprise security monitoring tools are so essential. Strains like the Mirai botnet can hijack devices for use as part of its botnet army; they can also overload your business services by sending too many requests, thus causing operational failures.
Without the right security measures in place, you cannot detect and prevent these attacks.
Your company’s assets, data, people, and general networks are all vulnerable. You need to hire IT security experts to use enterprise security monitoring tools and prevent imminent dangers from developing further.
How Does Enterprise Security Monitoring Work?
Monitoring your enterprise security lets you quickly find and eliminate rogue users within the organization. Vulnerabilities can hide below your detection radar and enterprise security monitoring can weed out these threats.
The principles behind it are simple – log aggregation, data analysis, and real-time threat intelligence. Perform remediation actions and integrate this data into a Security Information and Event Management Platform (SIEM).
As Ronald Reagan once said: “Information is the oxygen of the digital age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.” A cyber security expert works with legal entities to come up with the best laws and practices to secure sensitive data. Enterprise security monitoring implements these measures and works hand-in-hand with customer privacy protection, prevention of data theft, identity security, and other domain aspects.
Enterprise Security Monitoring Benefits
It’s no longer enough to install cameras, alarms, access controls, and surveillance systems to safeguard against today’s threats. The introduction of enterprise security monitoring tools and their implementation can provide peace of mind and provide proper backup and support to your organization; it covers many layers.
Here are the benefits of enterprise security monitoring for your business:
1. It Combats Cyber Criminals
One of the best benefits of enterprise security monitoring is that it adopts an offensive approach to cyber security. You can outsmart your attackers and stay ten steps ahead. The presence of powerful security measures will act as a strong deterrent. Enterprise security monitoring features like real-time alerts, encryption and authentication, and continuous compliance management, will fortify your defenses and improve overall cyber resilience.
2. You Can Get Great Visibility
Continuous security monitoring helps an organization identify potential vulnerabilities and mitigate cyber threats. It gives great insights into your current enterprise security posture and can help make solid recommendations for its substantial improvement. There are many benefits of early monitoring such as proactive threat response, more effective risk management, informed decision-making, and improved incident response. This ultimately will help you move away from compliance-driven risk management to data-driven risk management. Your threats cannot get the room to evolve that way and you can contain them before they further escalate.
3. Protect Your Assets
A great example of enterprise security monitoring in action is the case of a curious cafe owner. He installs a cloud system to monitor his premises remotely via a mobile app. The app gives him access to live updates and records footage for later review to ensure his cafe’s security is well maintained. He will know the whereabouts of his employees by setting up back-to-base alarm monitoring.
In the event perpetrators invade his premises, he’ll be notified immediately through phone call or SMS. All this wouldn’t be made possible without the right enterprise security monitoring tools in place. Plus, it grants him the ability to get 24/7 protection and enhances the physical safety of his business. It isn’t just the data he secures, but also all his assets and everything else in his business.
Enterprise Security Monitoring Challenges
Scaling up your enterprise security monitoring is like solving a big puzzle; there are a lot of moving pieces and you don’t want to jeopardize their safety throughout the process. There are challenges like budget restrictions, limitations with infrastructures, changing business requirements, and other things.
When you add multiple locations to the mix, it gets more complicated. It’s good to be aware of the common challenges so that you have the right solutions and strategies ready. Here is a list of the top enterprise security monitoring challenges:
1. Not Enough Surveillance
If you’re branching out to too many locations, a common pitfall is not having too many eyes on those sites. Insufficient surveillance and lack of on-site staffing are huge issues; if you’re dealing with maintaining security across different time zones and local regulations, you’ll have to navigate them too. Traditional security monitoring tools are great for post-incident investigations but terrible at preventing incidents. Most organizations take a reactive approach to security and not proactive measures, which is a problem.
2. Dynamic Business Environments
Traditional systems require on-grid connectivity. Temporary sites, remote facilities, and expansion into developing areas mean that businesses deal with unreliable or non-existent power grids. Lack of steady electricity can mean that your business can get quickly hijacked and you won’t be able to protect it. There is a chance that once your attacks gain access to digital systems, you can’t prevent data theft if the power supply shuts down. It’s not just the cyber aspect of enterprise security, but the physical that matters as well. You also need enterprise-wide controls and visibility at your fingertips in order to prevent these issues and prepare for unforeseen circumstances.
3. Data Breaches
1 in 3 attacks stem from shadow IT practices, making it harder to safeguard and track. All industries have seen increases in the number of data breaches, with healthcare companies facing the most crises. We are witnessing zero-days jumping up significantly over the previous years; ransomware and phishing attacks are also causing information compromises. Supply chain threats continue to impact organizations and victims.
Cyber adversaries are adept at launching identity-related fraud schemes and scams that lure victims into giving out their sensitive data. They also go beyond technology and exploit human errors in systems, thus deviating from mass attacks. Enterprise security monitoring tools are not equipped for such challenges and need future-proofing.
Enterprise Security Monitoring Best Practices
Understand how your data works. That is the single best piece of advice you can get before you venture into your enterprise security monitoring journey. To get the most value out of your monitoring solution, you will need to understand the different ways in which your data can get compromised.
Just implementing a continuous enterprise security monitoring strategy isn’t enough and compliance does not equal security. Here are the top enterprise security monitoring best practices you can apply to your organization that work for all industries:
1. Partner with Vendors You Can Trust
It’s important to evaluate the reputation of your potential partners before investing in any enterprise security monitoring solutions. Choose vendors that not only protect your data but keep your customers’ safety concerns and best interests in mind. You can reduce the risk of business disruptions and prevent revenue losses by ensuring the best data privacy and management practices.
2. Learn the Key Methods for Protecting Your Data
In June 2023, Zellis, a UK-based payroll solutions provider faced a data breach due to threat actors exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in their vendor. Employees make mistakes and legitimate errors happen due to lack of attention, fatigue, and other humane reasons. Another incident is the case of the two Tesla employees who were held responsible for data breaches due to insider leaks. Users can escalate privileges unknowingly or handle data in the wrong ways, thus compromising an organization’s safety. Insider threats are hard to detect since they can occur after many years with no traces of malicious behaviors to track. There are no fixed patterns.
According to Gartner, these are the four key data protection techniques you need to be aware of:
- Data encryption and authentication, where you prevent third parties from reading sensitive data
- Data masking – this will suppress or anonymize high-value data by replacing it with random characters. Another word for it is tokenization.
- Data erasure – Delete and clean up any data that’s left unused. Delete any inactive accounts associated with them too, from both public and private repos.
- Data backup – Make incremental backups of your sensitive data; store them across different locations and make them recoverable, and resilient.
Now that you’re aware of these key data protection techniques, start by finding a tool that implements them in your organization.
3. Establish Cyber Security Policies
Take a risk-based approach to data management and establish strong data usage policies. Conduct regular database audits, vulnerability assessments, and restrict premature employee terminations to reduce insider threats. You can appoint a dedicated data protection officer within the company to come up with these policies and procedures. A proper patch management strategy will prove to be beneficial as well.
Control your compliance and partner with a security vendor that supports multi-cloud compliance standards like GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, NIST, and other regulatory frameworks. It will help you avoid potential lawsuits, fines, and expensive reputational damages in the future.
4. Educate Your Employees About Enterprise Security Risks
The human element of security is something you can’t control or automate. But you can certainly take measures to ensure these errors don’t happen again. One of the best ways to ensure that is by educating your employees about emerging enterprise security risks.
Don’t forget to provide them with up-to-date training and performance reviews. Make it mandatory to go through cyber security awareness and training programs before onboarding them. It is vital to handle corporate assets securely, recognize malware and social engineering attempts, and get a grip on the best cyber hygiene practices so that they’re intuitive.
SentinelOne for Enterprise Security Monitoring
SentinelOne takes charge of your enterprise security monitoring and gives you a full suite of features to stay protected against modern cyber threats. It is a world-leading autonomous enterprise security platform that protects the cloud, data, and endpoints. You can break down security silos, gain enterprise-wide visibility and control, and gain actionable threat intelligence in real-time with AI.
If you use multiple security products, SentinelOne can consolidate them to maximize value and ensure business continuity.
There’s a reason why Fortune 500 companies choose SentinelOne over other enterprise security monitoring tools. It combines 24/7/365 threat hunting and managed services to anticipate threats and manage vulnerabilities; you get the best of AI-driven security automation and dedicated human-led insights.
Reduce your Active Directory Risks, detect and stop credential misuse, and prevent lateral movement.
SentinelOne’s Singularity™ Platform is the future of enterprise security and here’s why:
- Singularity™ extends security and visibility across VMs, servers, containers, and Kubernetes clusters.
- Singularity Cloud Workload Security protects your assets in public clouds, private clouds, and on-premise data centers.
- Singularity Identity offers proactive, real-time defense to mitigate cyber risk and defend against cyber attacks.
- Singularity Network Discovery uses built-in agent technology to actively and passively map networks; it delivers instant asset inventories and information about rogue devices. You can investigate how managed and unmanaged devices interact with critical assets and utilize device control from a unified interface to control IoT and suspicious or unmanaged devices.
- Zero missed detections, 100% visibility, and record-breaking ATT&CK evaluation.
- 96% of global security experts recommend it for EDR and EPP; Singularity™ Platform is a leader in the 2023 Magic Quadrant™ for Endpoint Protection Platforms.
Meet SentinelOne Purple AI: Your In-House Enterprise Security Analyst
Purple AI is a personal cyber security analyst who helps you detect, respond, and stay ahead of attacks earlier. It is the industry’s most advanced AI security analyst we’ve built on a single platform, console, and data lake. Use Purple AI’s patent-pending technology to scale autonomous protection and security across enterprises. Early adopters of Purple AI have reported up to 80% faster threat investigations and 78% say that its notebooks feature is extremely helpful.
We never use customer data to train Purple AI and it is highly architected; the notebooks are shareable. You can accelerate SecOps by streamlining complex investigations with summarized threat results and AI-powered analyses in natural language.
Purple AI also supports the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) to instantly query native and partner data in a normalized view. It grants you full visibility and empowers every level of analyst to conduct complex threat hunts with natural language queries.
Conclusion
The goal of enterprise security is to protect your assets, people, data management, storage, and information transfer facilities. Don’t neglect the basics and do everything in your power to prevent insider threats.
Consider implementing the practices we’ve mentioned above and use a reliable enterprise security vendor like SentinelOne to help you get started. By enhancing the protection of your data, people, and processes, you can fortify your defenses, improve compliance, and ensure cutting-edge enterprise security monitoring all throughout.