The concept of security posture, as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), refers to an organization’s overall cybersecurity strength—including its defenses and adaptability to evolving threats. This blog explores the transition of cybersecurity strategies from a reactive approach to enabling actionable visibility, for proactive protection across the expanding attack surface, and reducing risk in today’s digital enterprises.
Today’s Cyber Threats and Challenges in Maintaining Security Posture
The digital-first shift has broadened the enterprise attack surface significantly, necessitating advanced security measures to reduce the risk of breaches. For instance, the stealthy tactics of threat actors like Volt Typhoon, who remained undetected in U.S. critical infrastructure for years, underline the need for robust defences. Bolstering an organization’s security posture remains a challenge for cybersecurity teams; here are some reasons why:
- In the application security space, tool sprawl leads to isolated scanning activities that hinder the unified analysis and prioritization of vulnerabilities. And it is worth noting that eight of the top 10 data breaches of 2023 were related to application attack surfaces.
- Complying with various data residency and sovereignty laws using point tools and spreadsheets is an overwhelming task. Additionally, there is the ever-present risk of inadvertent breaches due to the limited visibility into a) where PII/PHI data resides and b) whether it is adequately protected.
- Verizon, in their 2023 DBIR report, found that 74% of all breaches are identity related, with threat actors exploiting the human element via privilege misuse, stolen credentials, social engineering, or just plain user error.
Enabling Automated, Proactive Protection—The Next Crucial Step
Security posture management is the ongoing process of monitoring and improving an organization’s security measures. It includes identifying vulnerabilities, ensuring adherence to security policies, and rapidly addressing new threats to maintain robust security defenses and minimize risks.
So, beyond simply introducing new acronyms, what essential benefits do security posture management solutions offer to an organization?
Application Security Posture Management:
- Aggregates and contextualizes security findings from various scanning tools throughout the SDLC.
- Implements AI to identify critical vulnerabilities—including internal, LLM-generated, and open-source code—with the highest business impact.
- Automates vulnerability fix suggestions and remediation early in the SDLC and, by orchestrating workflows, enables DevSecOps collaboration and eliminates tool sprawl.
Data Security Posture Management:
- Employs AI-driven analytics to automate the discovery and protection of sensitive data entities.
- Effectively reduces storage costs and minimizes the risk associated with data breaches through AI-driven financial risk modelling.
- Ensures compliance with a broad spectrum of regulatory requirements, including user and group access, to enhance overall data security and governance.
Identity Security Posture Management:
- Strengthens an organization’s defenses by providing a proactive framework that maintains the security posture of an organization’s identity infrastructure through automated workflows.
- Provides AI/ML behavior monitoring of identities and user/entity access and implements multi-factor/passwordless authentication.
- Ensures comprehensive governance through regular assessments and certifications.
- Applies the ‘least privilege principle’ and provides ongoing security awareness training.
Conclusion
The shift from point tools to comprehensive security posture management solutions marks the cybersecurity industry’s move from reactive responses to proactive, automated protection in increasingly complex and interconnected IT environments. This transition underscores the need for actionable visibility; to not only detect threats but also to aggregate and correlate data across various security layers to automate defenses and contextualize risk. By adopting this integrated approach, organizations can enable proactive risk management and develop a more dynamic, comprehensive, and automated strategy for cyber resilience.
OpenText™ offers solutions in application security, data security, and identity security as part of its broad-scope cybersecurity portfolio. Customers utilizing these platforms report:
Application Security
‘We looked at alternatives but found it a challenge to find a solution that identifies a wide range of vulnerabilities and makes them visible in an easy-to-action way. Once we saw what Fortify on Demand was capable of, we knew it was the solution for us.’ Jair García Osorio, Chief Technology Security Officer, Coca-Cola FEMSA
Data Security
‘We had investigated other vendors, but OpenText demonstrated clearly that it was the only company to provide integration between its solutions and our specific data repositories. This, coupled with the expertise we saw from OpenText consultants, convinced us that Voltage Fusion and File Reporter were the right match for us.’ Senior VP of Infrastructure & Information, Major United States Bank.
Identity Security
‘We have worked with the NetIQ suite of identity and access management solutions for the last 20 years and felt NetIQ Identity Governance ticked all required boxes. We introduced it in a proof-of-concept (POC) and beat the other vendors in the mix.’ Brent Kynaston, Solutions Architect, TriVir
