5 Secret Habits Of Highly Successful Network Security Programs

A new report out today shows that when IT organizations are segmented by security success factors, the top performers share a number of network security best practices. Conducted by ReRez Research and commissioned by Infoblox, the study highlighted in these findings took a close look at 200 large organizations to see how habits differed among top-tier organizations and everyone else.

Before we take a look at these secret success habits, let's examine what qualifies an organization as a top-tier security organization. The study classed these organizations as twice as likely to have satisfied internal customers from across the line-of-business, including executives. Top-tier organizations are twice as likely to meet SLAs and ten times as likely to remediate security events extremely quickly, and they are much less likely to experience security-related outages or breaches. They are four times as likely to have complete control over their IP addressing. And they're twice as likely to focus on strategic rather than tactical tasks.

Here are some of the reasons why they post those kinds of results:

Make Better Use Of Intelligence

Successful cybersecurity organizations have made a commitment to security intelligence. Compared to lower performers, the best organizations are six times as likely to have deployed a SIEM and four times as likely to invest in machine-readable threat intelligence. They're also six times as likely to use automated tools that alert them to new devices appearing on the network.

Instill Cooperation Between Network, Security, And App Teams

Bottom-tier organizations tend to be more siloed than their counterparts. Cooperation among network operations staff, security staff, and application teams is the name of the game in top-tier organizations, with 100% of them reporting this as a best practice compared to just half of bottom-tier organizations. The high performers are also nine times as likely to use integrated visibility tools and four times as likely to use integrated security tools.

Leverage DNS/DHCP Data

This is a growing differentiator between the security haves and have-nots. Close to half of top-tier organizations use DNS/DHCP data to discover new devices, compared to zero bottom-tier contenders. The best organizations are also three times as likely to use DNS logs for security purposes.

Automate Basic Tasks

Manual processes kill bottom-tier performance and the best orgs recognize that. Almost all top performers have automated routine tasks--including configuration management and compliance tracking. That's three to four times more likely than the average laggard organization.

Invest In Security Staff

This may seem like a no-brainer gimme, but the top-tier organizations are performing well because they're investing in their security staff. These leading orgs are three times less likely to report being understaffed for security and 58% say they have a dedicated incident response team, compared to 33% of the laggards.

Related Content: