Turning data into intelligence is a prerequisite in these highly uncertain times, because not only does that empower organisations of all shapes and sizes to address today's cyber security challenges, but it also accelerates their ability to enable the innovation and agility of their businesses moving forward.
Intelligence is a critical asset for any business. Intelligence that enables better defence from today’s digitized threats we call “cyber intelligence”. This intelligence should not just be limited to the way we manage our data or technology but also the way we can apply better cyber intelligence to our processes and how we enable our people to be more cyber aware.
Let’s consider some of the challenges enterprises face and why better cyber intelligence matters so much.
First, digitisation is driving a new horizon for people and businesses. Software is intertwined in our daily personal and business lives – from checking email, to booking flights, to your organisations digitally enabled business systems and the way we interact with partners, clients, customers not to mention how we interact with our friends and families. This is contributing to an unremitting explosion in data growth with forecasts predicted to hit 40ZB by 2020 – if that happens there will be as many bytes of data on the planet as there are stars in the sky! Meanwhile, future emerging technology trends such as - the ‘Internet of Things’ – will require people to feel even more secure, as the number of Internet-enabled devices is beginning to explode. This rapid digitisation is testing times for every business but also how it influences the interactions and security of our personal lives.
So, what is the answer for better business cyber defence in these changing times? Putting in place an Intelligence driven cyber security strategy. Because this delivers both better intelligence, and the means by which enterprises can advance and future-proof the protective barriers around the business. It is, quite frankly, a game changer for any organisation. Most of all, it's a strategy that leverages Symantec's unique assets – our massive global footprint and access to huge amounts of security intelligence – helping us better protect information, manage risk, and prevent, detect and remediate attacks wherever these may happen.
Secondly, and just as importantly, it's a strategy that puts Symantec at the centre of a new security intelligence ecosystem – an ecosystem that will stimulate entirely new third-party products and services, making Symantec central to ensuring the constant security of our customers and partners. In short, better intelligence right across our customers’ business processes, delivering greater awareness for their people. Ultimately, ‘Big Data’ cyber security intelligence enables enterprises to take huge volumes of security information and:
- Be more prepared – understand the risk profile and have greater visibility across the estate
- Be better informed, more quickly, of external risks
- Be able to quickly detect and react to such threats
- Be able to prioritise the critical ones and direct security capabilities to the right activity
- Respond more effectively and recover much quicker
- Ultimately, be more protected!
In delivering against this remit, every single one of Symantec products and services will need to gather rich intelligence, analyse it and leverage the resulting insights, so that what we bring to our customers is a total cyber intelligence offering.
How are we making this happen? Defining a new technology and service based strategy that leverages our massively scalable analytics platform and leveraging cutting-edge techniques to mine our unified intelligence assets. These are once-in-a-lifetime engineering challenges – ones that need to be embraced, if we are not only to keep pace with the breath-taking rate at which cybercrime is evolving, but to stay one step ahead of the game.
My next blog will look in some detail at how Symantec is leveraging cyber intelligence into its solutions.
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