How can you maintain a resilient operations center to achieve your zero-trust security? What are the following strategies to do? We will discuss that in this section.
Strategies In Maintaining Effective Zero Trust Security Operations Center
The first strategy is to have a central system for:
- Monitoring,
- logging and
- ‘analyzing security events.
The second is to implement a system that can monitor, log and analyze security incidents.
The third is to continue building capabilities to achieve zero trust security.
The fourth is to reduce the time to detect and time to respond when incidents occur. The fifth is to improve incident response.
Central System For Monitoring, Logging, And Analyzing Security Events:
As stated earlier, the zero trust security operations center should be able to respond in minutes or less when an incident occurs. Therefore, the operations center should be able to monitor all activities of enterprise systems and networks in real-time.
This can be achieved by having a central system. It should be able to monitor, log and analyze security events for the enterprise.
It can include:
- Monitoring of network traffic,
- logs from all devices,
- IDS/IPS alerts (for example, Suricata),
- Syslog and other logs from applications
Especially those that could pose a threat (for example, financial transaction systems).
Logging of all activities for analysis. Acting as a SIEM with additional functionality like correlation rules and analytics.
So it can be performed on the data collected by the other two elements above.
It is important to have a central monitoring, logging, and analyzing system. This will allow the operations center to respond quickly to incidents.
How Important is The Zero Trust Security Operations Center?
The zero trust security operations center is one of the most important pillars of the zero trust security framework.
It is important for the following reasons:
- To identify threats to the enterprise
- To detect and respond to incidents in real-time.
- Prevent any potential disaster from happening.
For example, by being able to detect a threat before it can cause damage or be notified when an incident occurs. We can respond appropriately and quickly. Or we can prevent the threat from happening.
This will decrease the risk of data breaches and other incidents that could occur later on. Therefore, providing better security to the enterprise.
Challenges In Maintaining Zero Trust Security Operations Center
The following are the challenges for zero trust security operations center:
- We need to know what to monitor, where to monitor and what to monitor for.
- We need to have a baseline so we can determine if there is an incident or not.
Strategies should be implemented so the operations center can be effective. A good SIEM (Security Information Event Management) system should be implemented.
It should be able to collect, analyze and correlate events from other monitoring systems. The SIEM system should be able to send notifications for incidents that have happened.
So the operations center can be aware of them.
As stated above, there are many ways we can respond to reduce the risk of threats and security incidents. There are many types of technologies that can help achieve this goal like the following:
- WAF (Web Application Firewall),
- IEM,
- UTM (Unified Threat Management) and more.
However, they all should follow one common principle. It is the visibility into the network. All devices, servers, applications, and more should be monitored by such technologies in real-time.
Only then will we know if there is an incident or not as soon as it occurs. Not only that, but we can also take necessary actions as soon as possible before it becomes a problem.
The same applies to logging because it is also important for us to know whether there was an incident or not when it occurred in the past so we can prevent any potential damage from happening again in the future.