The year 2020 is already in full swing and whether you’re embarking on Veganuary, Dry January or abstaining by way of a fast, it is undoubtedly a good time to take a fresh look at any problems you were facing in 2019 or opportunities from which advantages have not yet been fully taken.

The security world is no different and January can be a great time to take stock and evaluate your security stack. Some key areas I’d recommend for attention include:

1. Getting more out of your IT Infrastructure and harnessing it for security
   No business would say ‘no’ to doing more with less. It means higher margins, reduced costs and ultimately more value for the business. There are still untapped areas within an IT infrastructure that can be used for security. DNS is ubiquitous, for example, and is a rich source of threat information that can be used to better secure and defend a business.
2. Stop recreating the wheel, and ensure your threat intelligence harnesses already known threats
   The security industry must pull together its knowledge of cyber crime to create a stronger defense. Threat feeds can be an invaluable source of intelligence that can improve the speed and effectiveness of incident response. Ensuring your security vendors are making use of commercially available threat feeds, is paramount.
3. Identify and rectify your gaps in threat intelligence
   All security solutions should bring with them additional intelligence and capabilities to defend an organization. These should help plug the threat intelligence gaps of what’s already available and use proprietary technology to find the ‘unknown’ threats.
4. Focus on the security incidents that matter by cutting out the noise
   Alert fatigue is a very real issue among security teams, making it essential that security solutions don’t add to the noise, but instead allow your team to prioritize. This should be complemented with a degree of automation to ensure while the security experts are focusing their expertise where it matters, the business isn’t being exposed in other areas.
5. Ensure you have true specialists
   It’s often easier to ask an existing vendor to expand the types of security they are delivering for you as an organization, but this isn’t always the best way of getting the most secure infrastructure. It can also get you caught into upgrade contract renewals later down the line. Instead, look to independent advice on how to balance your security stack. Gartner talks of the SOC visibility triad, for example, breaking out SIEM, end-point protection and network detection and response as three key areas for defense.

Whichever way you plan to improve your security posture in 2020, evaluation and integration are fundamental. It only takes one vulnerability for a cyber criminal to penetrate a network and cause damage if not identified, making it paramount that a security ecosystem works together and evolves to the latest threat landscape.

2020 promises to be an exciting year, but let’s work together to ensure it’s a win for cyber defense and not for cyber criminals.