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Tag: MDR

  • MDR for DevSecOps: How Managed Security Can Help You Shift Left

    MDR for DevSecOps: How Managed Security Can Help You Shift Left

    What is managed detection and response (MDR)? Managed detection and response (MDR) is an outsourced service that helps organizations detect threats on endpoints, respond to them and carry out proactive threat hunting.

    MDR services typically include an endpoint detection and response (EDR) platform, which is deployed on company endpoints, and human security experts. MDR providers give their customers access to security analysts and engineers who can help with endpoint security, network security management, triage of alerts and responding to real security incidents (here’s some further reading and more background on managed detection and response platforms).

    Why is MDR Important?

    Traditional managed security services (MSS) offer basic monitoring and alerting that do not provide the context and guidance needed to identify, respond to and remediate real security incidents. It leaves organizations exposed to many threats that pass through these basic services.

    How MDR Helps Protect Organizations

    MDR provides a proactive, outcome-driven approach that goes beyond the scope of what MSS vendors can offer. Common MDR services include:

    • Continuous network and endpoint monitoring.
    • Security orchestration.
    • Threat hunting.
    • Integrated response actions like remote threat containment.
    • Advanced MDR services also offer extended detection across clouds such as AWS, GCP, Azure and common SaaS suites like Google Workspace and Office 365. Other providers can protect incident command systems (ICS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems within operational technology (OT) environments.

    What is DevSecOps?

    DevSecOps is a software development methodology that unifies previously disparate development (Dev), security (Sec), and operations (Ops) teams. It aims to integrate security across all development life cycle phases, including design, development, testing, deployment and delivery. It involves using automation to integrate security across all phases.

    In the past, security tasks were performed at the end of the development pipeline by a separate security team. Next, the product was tested by a quality assurance (QA) team. This approach worked when developers released software updates only once or twice per year. However, once software development teams adopted Agile and DevOps pipelines to reduce the development time, security became a bottleneck.

    How DevSecOps Improves Security

    DevSecOps integrates security into Agile and DevOps pipelines. It ensures teams can address security issues during the early phases of the development cycle. As a result, teams can apply fixes when it is easier and faster to remediate before products are released to production.

    DevSecOps makes security a responsibility shared by all teams, including Dev, Sec and Ops. It is no longer the sole responsibility of one team that creates a security silo. Instead, it enables teams to automate secure software delivery, prioritizing security without slowing down the software development cycle.

    How Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Solutions Benefit DevSecOps

    DevOps has revolutionized application development. However, due to the high velocity of modern development methods, they can introduce security gaps and flaws.

    In addition to regular security breaches occurring across the DevOps pipeline, new and sophisticated attacks, most significantly supply chain attacks infect the development systems themselves or third-party software components. This results in mega-attacks that can compromise millions of devices before being detected.

    How can MDR help?

    MDR is a relatively new cybersecurity offering but is beginning to have a major impact on companies seeking better protection with lower operational overhead. There are many overalls between MDR and DevOps. To integrate cybersecurity into production and deployment pipelines, some organizations are turning to a DevSecOps approach and MDR can help.

    DevSecOps makes cybersecurity an integral part of the entire DevOps life cycle. As more organizations implement DevSecOps, they can supplement the knowledge and security best practices of in-house teams with the security expertise provided by MDR services.

    How MDR Keeps DevOps Ahead

    MDR keeps DevOps teams ahead of the latest threats by keeping developers up-to-date on emerging threats and vulnerabilities and providing advanced tools for continuous security monitoring and response in their development and deployment pipelines. A key benefit of MDR is that it provides access to experts who can take action to prevent attacks, not just provide recommendations.

    MDR becomes a supporting element that allows developers to write more secure code as well as better secure their DevOps environment. With the help of MDR technology and experts, it becomes easier to identify advanced threats that can bypass security controls before they impact the DevOps environment or the resulting software product.

    Considerations for Selecting an MDR Solution

    • There are several important considerations when choosing an MDR platform suitable for a DevOps environment:
    • Understanding of attack surfaces common in a DevSecOps environment, and the ability to monitor and control the relevant environments.
    • Measures are taken to eliminate false positives and prioritize alerts. DevOps teams operate at high velocity and do not have time to wade through irrelevant alerts.
    • Automated triage and response at all stages of the development lifecycle. In earlier stages, this should take the form of actionable recommendations for developers, and in later stages, full incident response for production environments.

    All of this is useful as you find the right way to shift your organization to a true DevSecOps process.

  • How Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Solutions Benefit DevOps

    How Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Solutions Benefit DevOps

    Managed Detection and Response (MDR), a relative newcomer in the cybersecurity realm, is starting to have a noticeable impact on enterprises seeking to better secure their operations. Research giant Gartner notes that, “By 2025, 50% of organizations will be using MDR services for threat monitoring, detection and response functions that offer threat containment capabilities.” Despite rising adoption rates, though, much confusion remains about MDR and how it should fit into enterprise IT.

    MDR is typically defined as an outsourced security service that enables organizations to better detect malicious activity over the network. MDR is usually sold as a service, and vendors offer tools and technologies that integrate into a business’s IT to detect and mitigate network intrusions, malware attacks, attempted data theft and other malicious threats. MDR can be a powerful ally in the quest to contain cyberattacks, but only if deployed correctly and leveraged properly.

    Enterprise Benefits

    MDR offers obvious benefits for enterprises, but there’s enormous potential when MDR is integrated with DevOps. Many organizations are turning to DevSecOps methodologies to build cybersecurity into their development and deployment pipelines, and MDR can help.

    “One challenge is that DevSecOps is a term that is poorly defined in most cases, and misunderstood in many others,” said Dave Martin, senior director, product management – threat response at Open Systems. “Some people think of DevSecOps as an extension of a quality assurance department, which means that cybersecurity is mostly an afterthought, and not part of the development cycle. MDR, at least how we do it at Open Systems, brings forth a full-time security operations layer, which includes a security analyst, that can become part of the DevOps team,” Martin said. 

    Martin makes an interesting point. As more organizations attempt to implement DevSecOps, knowledge, along with action, are lacking. MDR has the potential to supplement knowledge and insight into the security posture of the code being generated. Many organizations leave cybersecurity to the network or operations teams, expecting endpoint or network security tools alone to contain threats. However, many threats in the wild may leverage older code, or target unpatched applications. MDR can enable DevOps teams to get ahead of the latest threats by keeping developers informed about evolving threats and vulnerabilities, as well as incorporating tools for continuous cybersecurity into the development and deployment pipelines. One of the core concepts of MDR is providing access to experts that can take action to mitigate an attack. This is an important consideration, according to the Enterprise Strategy Group, which reports that 51% of survey respondents face a problematic shortage of skills in the area of cybersecurity.

    What’s more, MDR becomes a tool to secure the DevOps environment, as well as a tool for developers to make code more secure. “It is critical to find advanced threats, ones that may have bypassed existing security controls, before those threats impact DevOps, yet people need to be made aware of those threats so they are not mistakenly included in the development pipeline,” said Martin.

    Choosing an MDR Provider

    With so many players in the MDR space, choosing a provider that fits into a DevOps and enterprise strategy can be daunting. According to Reports and Data, the global MDR market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 30.4% until it reaches $4.6 billion by 2026. Today, providers number in the dozens, and while many claim they have “complete” offerings, they may not consider the needs of DevSecOps along with traditional network operations concerns.

    There are some important considerations when choosing an MDR platform. For example, visibility of the attack surface is a critical concern. If an MDR provider does not have visibility into all potential attack surfaces, breaches and compromises may still occur. Also, adopters should be keenly aware of how false positives are contained, as well as the level of alert activity. Many cybersecurity solutions can introduce alert fatigue and obscure effectiveness. Automation should be a key part of any MDR solution, as it can help to categorize threats, initiate responses and identify the latest threat trends without human interaction. 

    “MDR should tear down many of the cybersecurity silos that businesses have today, and bring the various pieces of IT together into a unified cybersecurity sensitive culture,” said Martin.

    Ultimately, MDR is about people, processes and technology, and should bring these elements together to ensure success in the ongoing battle against cybercriminals.