Why observability is key for security

Christina Kosmowski at LogicMonitor argues that full observability enables organisations to keep crucial systems running, enabling businesses to innovate and defend against threats. 

 

The pandemic initiated a wave of digital transformation imperatives that introduced incredible complexity to technology infrastructures. Now, nearly every company is a digital business, which means when a company’s tech stack is compromised, everything grinds to a halt.

 

This is particularly concerning as you only have to glance at the headlines to understand that cyber crime is on the rise. A staggering 37% of UK companies reported a data breach incident to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in the past 12 months and 17% reported more than one incident.

 

And truth be told, it is likely that the percentage of breaches is actually much higher, as many organisations will not report breaches for fear of reputational damage.

 

But reputation is not the only thing at stake. Data breaches cost UK enterprises an average of $3.88 million per breach, according to IBM and Ponemon’s Cost of a Data Breach study. For many businesses, the cost of a security breach is devastating and for some, it can be unrecoverable.

 

As cyber threats loom large, how can businesses bolster their security through observability? 

 

Maintaining a holistic operations overview  

As businesses scale, it can become increasingly difficult to keep track of all the processes, locations, and various touchpoints, meaning companies may not even know where they are vulnerable. The rise of remote work has also led to more vulnerabilities as employees may be logging on from unsecure networks or personal devices, exposing themselves to risks they would not encounter at the office.

 

With security breaches becoming more common and occuring at any point in the tech stack, CIOs and IT leaders need to be able to report the exact status of their technology and its safety at a moment’s notice. To accurately report on this, they need visibility across the entire stack.

 

This is where Full Stack Observability (FSO) platforms come in. FSO platforms help IT teams cut through the noise, get to the right data, and investigate what caused specific events.

 

To achieve true observability, teams need visibility across their organisation’s IT systems and applications, and to be able to monitor operational statuses and diagnostic data in real time. But what do you do with that data?

 

An FSO platform with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities has become vital, as AI and ML help provide context as to how events culminated into the larger incident, as well as the potential negative impact it will have on the broader business.

 

Full observability with AI/ML capabilities allows IT teams to dig deeper to identify why a particular system or application is down or where a security breach may have occurred.

 

Observability is more than just visibility

Observability requires a sophisticated and holistic approach. Once full observability is achieved, organisations are able to keep crucial systems and business applications up and running, enabling businesses to innovate and advance forward. 

 

Having full observability can also prevent dreaded siloes from forming, whether by function or location. The bigger an organisation’s tech stack becomes, the bigger the silos between functions or countries. Siloes can significantly reduce overall visibility of an organisation’s operations, making it challenging to gauge not only the overall system health and efficiency, but also the state of readiness and cyber protection.

 

This means that organisations don’t have visibility into what’s going on, which can force CIOs and IT teams to adopt a reactive stance, reporting and acting on issues as they occur.

 

By implementing FSO early on in an organisation’s journey, IT teams can gain a holistic understanding of the systems and solutions they are running. Having a holistic overview of an organisation’s IT can help to prevent silos from occurring in the first place, as they will have a greater understanding of how the stack works together to form the bigger picture.

 

It will also reduce the risk of running multiple solutions to target localised problems, which can add to an already over-complicated stack as teams will be able to take more accurate risk readings and implement the right proactive solutions.

 

By leveraging an FSO platform that enables collection, analysis, contextualization insights and exploration of observability data across traditional and modern environments, IT teams can rally around this single source of truth to quickly resolve issues and shift their time and investment to work that drives innovation and protects their organisation from digital risks.

 

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Christina Kosmowski is CEO at LogicMonitor

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com