4 Tips to Help CIOs, CISOs Evaluate and Find the Right Tooling Partner

Find a partner who understands your business and security objectives. Organizations should seek a cybersecurity advisor who can build effective security programs rooted in fundamentals and aligned with business goals. Having a partner who understands your business and appreciates your challenges, expectations and company culture can help you establish and refine your security efforts. Since many new entrants, vendors and technologies are similar in cybersecurity, you stand a better chance by having an advisor who can help you assess the best environment to achieve your objectives using a suite of tools that work together.

Build integrated toolsets. What’s required today to secure a business and maintain control is security tooling that fits together and works, providing you with the bird’s-eye view, early warning, reporting and monitoring around the efficacy of what you’ve constructed. Security platforms with common back-ends and quality reporting can help you demonstrate organizational value (registration required) so you continue to receive and build upon that investment.

Leverage a tooling partner to build a strategic security road map. As an organization, you shouldn’t just implement quick fixes without having a road map of what you want your ecosystem and complementary toolset to look like. Operating off a strategic plan is important so that tactical issues such as remediation efforts or audit issues don’t accidentally become your strategy. The challenges facing organizations today in many cases result from pursuing a strategy where buying the best specific discrete solution to solve a problem prevailed but failed to achieve better comprehensive visibility and holistic security. For example, suppose you are using different vendors for data loss prevention (DLP) and identity access management (IAM) tools. In that case, they’re different data sources that don’t necessarily build an ecosystem that works together and enhances visibility.

Find a partner that can help maximize existing tools. Buying different point solutions to solve discrete security objectives has fallen out of favor. This approach requires interfacing solutions and centralizing data to achieve visibility, which comes with many hidden costs. We have seen many instances where clients aren’t using all the capabilities available in their current technology stack. In these scenarios, they can check their product configurations and turn on products they’re already paying for. Helping partners attain security objectives with their existing capabilities is particularly valuable in a challenging macroeconomic environment.