Role of Threat Intelligence in Business World

June 6, 2017 by

Irfan Shakeel

New, sophisticated threats persist in emerging daily across various platforms like social media, mobile, email and web applications. Simultaneously, new, high-profile malware and attack methods keep on evolving, bypassing vacant security solutions and tailoring attacks against the well-known companies in the world. The devices we use daily are now subject to compromise and can be influenced by attacks.

To identify and stop attackers, organizations need to understand the sophisticated threat landscape. For that, complete cyber threat intelligence is required to explore the information about threats, trends, and attacks. In the business world, threat intelligence plays an important role and involves extensive data gathering tools and technologies, including managed security services across the corporate Infrastructure, professional service engagements, customer incidents and threat intelligence platform.

To assess the role of threat intelligence in the business world, a wide range of data collection is being used by "NTT Innovation Institute" to capture the diversity of attacks which are normal in the modern security landscape. Organizational IT exists in a hybrid model which combines on-premise as well as cloud and SaaS-based services which diversify the attack landscape. Meanwhile, IT departments in compliance and regulation- critical businesses need to preserve high levels of security for their existing mission-critical systems.

This variety of infrastructure created an astonishing increase in the complexity of managing security operations and entails analysis which is not just limited to the local infrastructure. Moreover, the cybercriminals are widely organized, well funded, and are having expert skills in breaching security layers at most organizations.

The challenge is versatile because of:

• The burden of learning new technologies
• Increasing costs with hard-to-factor ROI
• A worldwide shortage of skilled security engineers and professionals
• Inconsistent user experiences across the variety of products needed
• Incompatible or poor integration between the hierarchy of products

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The Broader View of Threat Intelligence:

Typical and usual frameworks were intended to fight a very unlike threat battle. They involve a number of different products, from a range of vendors, to manage and defend a variety of network access points, processes, and products. Security control is accomplished using networks and products hierarchy to create a "wall" around a network to safeguard endpoints and servers as well as precious data and information.

With the threat intelligence program, organizations can deal with customer's security challenges with demonstrated, live, and actionable supporting data based on the enhanced framework. However, what is most desirable is a framework which effectively uses the existing security information, then converts it to genuine intelligence through in-depth analysis.

This new framework will improve the industry's ability to deliver security controls using an integrated hierarchy of products, services, and intelligence. Organizations will be able to consider intelligence which is meaningful to them, and when combined with an awareness of their own environments, will enable better management of risk and application of appropriate controls.

The best threat intelligence establishes security flexibility and integration for:

• Proactive protection
• Threat mitigation before attacks even begin
• Minimal damage even if attacked
• Faster recovery from the damage
• Continuously improved security operations

Threat Intelligence is an evolving capability in security, and there are many vendors entering the marketplace. Vendors utilize data from their respective installed bases or through customer service engagements. Threat intelligence in the business world is constrained by technologies, the nature of the information and its sources, reliability of the data and the environmental coverage.

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Moreover, it enables security experts to provide actionable insight which can minimize cyber security threats, mitigate damages, and quickly recover to effectively reduce business disruption and it also provides new and enhanced proactive security services, including threat watch for clouds and applications hosted on cloud servers.