7 tips for achieving defensive agility

Publisher excerpt From CSO Online

Defensive security agility reflects an organization’s potential to rapidly detect, adapt, and respond to evolving cyber threats and vulnerabilities without disrupting core operations. By abandoning static, rigid defense architectures, an agile defense plan emphasizes continuous iteration, automation, and cross-functional flexibility. Defensive agility allows cybersecurity teams to rapidly adapt and respond to evolving threats while minimizing business disruption, says Anant Adya, an executive vice president at business and technology consulting firm Infosys. “As attack surfaces expand, organizations must prioritize risk quantification and identify vulnerabilities to strengthen their security posture and improve their ability to recover from attacks that are inevitable.” Is your organization taking the steps needed to achieve a high degree of defensive agility? Read on to find out. 1. Establish a zero-trust baseline Achieving defensive agility should begin with a zero-trust approach that continuously verifies access across users, devices, and applications, Adya advises. “An effective zero-trust strategy must be embedded into an organization’s technology framework and business lifecycle in order to build resilience and foster an organization-wide security mindset.” As enterprises adopt AI, modernize applications, and operate across highly distributed environments, security must evolve from a protective afterthought into a business accelerant, Adya says. “By integrating zero trust into day-to-day operations and AI workflows, organizations can strengthen their ability to adapt to evolving threats while innovating faster, integrating acquisitions more securely, and scaling globally without accumulating architectural or operational debt.” 2. Modernize (and rationalize) your existing security infrastructure Many large organizations are struggling to keep pace with emerging challenges because their systems are incredibly complex or filled with old software, custom code, and a mixture of disconnected security tools that can hinder containment speed, says Sharon Chand, cyber defense and resilience leader at Deloitte. Chand advises CISOs to evaluate their existing infrastructure and technologies to consider how they’re currently responding to threats. Meanwhile, it’s important to streamline operations into a more integrated system. “Security organizations must also have access to AI-driven systems to detect and automate response to machine-speed attacks at the pace of adversaries,” she states. 3. Enlist AI where confidence is high and actions are reversible Randy Gross, CISO at training and certification organization CompTIA, recommends deciding in advance which defensive actions are safe enough to happen without placing a human in the middle. “Locking an account, killing a session, or isolating a device should already be automated when confidence is high and the action is easy to reverse,” he says. Review your strategy at least quarterly, but n…

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