On average, it takes financial companies 98 days to detect data breaches, according to ZDNet. In this time, a lot can happen to the company’s data, from cyber criminals selling your data to other interested parties to them infiltrating deeper into your data pool. With reference to the recent Equifax data breach, the effects of the breach would have been less if the company had responded to it as soon as hackers gained access to their network.
Since such companies have already invested in state-of-the-art and speed to insights the key to cybersecurity tools, the issue lies in their speed of coming up with insights after data analysis. The faster they can identify a breach, the easier it will be to contain it. But how can you actually improve your time to value with data?
Here is more on why the time to value for data matters and how to improve it:
Why Speed Really Matters?
Business leaders realize the power that lies in data analysis and gaining contextual insights from data. That’s why most chose to invest in network monitoring and log monitoring tools among other tools to gain the necessary insights. However, every second counts when trying to detect a breach.
For the development team, identifying a glitch in the new application tweak can be pivotal in increasing its efficiency and product life cycle. For the operations team, this could mean preventing some downtime as well as improving customer satisfaction. Lastly, identifying threats fast can help lower the costly impact that a data breach will have on your organization.
You Need Historical Data For The Best Insights
Sure, most data will be more than helpful when insights are drawn from it quickly, but not all data is created the same. For instance, some data will also need you to compare it to other related data that you might have recorded in the past. This can apply in situations where you would like to monitor the reliability of your website as well as identify factors that are bringing down your site’s uptime.
On the other hand, other data sets will provide you with ‘perishable insights.’ Think in the line of a security issue in an airline that switches the control of the plane to a hacker. The faster the airline pilots can identify the underlying issue, the easier it will be to avoid unwanted circumstances. As such, you should look to combine both speed in insights with historical context as well as differentiating insights that need an immediate response from those that will need time to offer the greatest advantage.
An Agile Culture Will Help
Getting insights from data within the shortest time possible will typically mean constant change. This is because you will need to react to the insights within the shortest time allowed to prevent any repercussions. For instance, vulnerabilities will need to be patched fast to avoid having hackers identify the vulnerabilities before any patches are applied.
As such, working in a culture that supports strong change management policies can be pivotal in supporting the idea of receiving speedy insights from data. With an agile team culture, for instance, employees will expect change to appear in their doorsteps rather than be resistant to it.
Question-Based Data Analytics Might Not Suffice
Conventionally, data analytics teams needed to analyze data when looking for something specific such as an anomaly in the network. While this question-based approach to data analytics has always worked over the years, it is no longer enough when living in a world of numerous threats. The faster you can identify a threat you didn’t know existed, the easier it will be to deal with it.
Ideally, your team should not confine itself to the questions whose answers it is looking for. They should put security data under the microscope and identify other aspects that might be subtle but dangerous to the survival of the business. The best way to achieve this would be to invest in tools that offer context based alerts to increase the level of visibility data can provide.
Additionally, IT teams should go through constant training to ensure that they are versed with new security threats. This can prevent being caught by surprise once a data breach stems from a current industry threat.
Conclusion
Data is of no value as long as it isn’t insightful. The more you invest in drawing speedy conclusions from data analytics, the stronger your cybersecurity posture will be. Consider the tips above to improve your data value through timely insights.