Completing IT Security With Critical Alerting

Businesses and organizations shouldn’t simply rely on monitoring tools for security management. Such tools don’t provide redundancies, time-stamped audit trails and other elements needed for incident resolution.

Also, security threats are rampant and tend to go unchecked even with the most reliable monitoring service. That’s why companies require critical alerting to become aware of security incidents and immediately solve them for business continuity.

Businesses That Manually Investigate Alerts

According to American Security Today, 37 percent of businesses continue to manually investigate security threats. From that 37 percent, 1,200 organizations (seven percent) don’t act on the alerts they receive.

Further, less than 20 percent of alerts are actually investigated. As a result, ignored alerts are able to stop business operations for one- to eight hours, resulting in the average cost to smaller organizations at $117,000 for the breaches.

So, what does it mean to manually investigate alerts? It simply indicates that without proper alerting, IT professionals are to continually monitor their email inboxes for incident management and resolution. But of course, inboxes tend to get stuffed, which leads to alerts being missed or lost.

Monitoring Tools Aren’t Enough

Monitoring tools are unable to provide complete incident management for businesses. According to CSO, 43 percent of cyberattacks target small organizations, and 60 percent of those companies go out of business within six months of a breach.

These occurrences can be attributed to monitoring tools, as they don’t differentiate the severity of alerts. Rather, monitoring tools create no immediacy for IT professionals to act on threats and to restore business operations. The truth is that monitoring tools shouldn’t be used alone, as they lack:

• Alert Escalation
• Failover Reports
• Secure and Encrypted Two-Way Messaging
• Persistent Alerts
• Presence Information
• Multi-Channel Alerting

Also, monitoring tools can’t keep up with the quantity of cyber threats. According to Ayehu, cyberattacks are becoming more rampant as they’re occurring on a daily basis. Without intelligent alerting, targeted businesses become vulnerable and tend to experience reputational damage, theft and loss of shareholder trust.

Further, monitoring tools can’t handle and protect businesses from more sophisticated cyberattacks. As an example, Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) are complex network attacks that are hard to discover and detect for speedy resolution.

In the case of Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corporation, one of the nation’s largest generation cooperatives, it relied on a monitoring service for security threat and breach notifications. Unfortunately, this was a poor way for the corporation to address incidents in a timely manner.

On average, it would take 18.5 hours for a company such as Arkansas Electric to resolve downtime issues. That’s why the corporation recognized that it needed OnPage, an incident alert management platform, for cybersecurity compliance, on-call scheduling and MTTR reduction.

Using OnPage for Incident Resolution

Businesses can enhance their incident resolution practices with OnPage. That’s because OnPage prevents IT professionals from misjudging an email’s importance through high or low-priority alerting.

Now, IT responders can differentiate between serious outages or simple, infrastructure maintenance issues. Along with this, the OnPage platform sends immediate, audible alerts for up to eight hours until they’re acknowledged.

Further, OnPage allows for escalations in the case that a responder is momentarily unavailable. So, what does it mean to escalate an alert? It simply suggests that if an alert is unacknowledged by an on-call responder, the next qualified IT professional in line will address the notification. As a result, incident alerts will no longer be missed or lost in a responder’s inbox.

In the event that a message is sent to an escalation group and doesn’t reach anyone, IT managers can then use an OnPage failover report to determine how to improve incident management for imminent threats.

Besides this, all excuses are gone with the OnPage platform, as it provides audit trails showing when alerts are delivered, received and opened by an IT responder. Through this feature, IT teams can improve accountability and incident resolution performance.

Using a monitoring tool is only half the answer to managing security threats. Rather, companies also need an incident alert platform for speedy threat resolution and business continuity. With OnPage, businesses can defend against security threats and ensure that their operations are unaffected and uninterrupted.