Symantec Introduces Risk Insight to Automate Risk Assessments

How secure is your business?  It seems like a simple question, but it can be challenging to answer.

The good news is today Symantec has introduced Risk Insight – a new service that makes answering that question much easier.  We understand that there are a variety of factors that make it daunting to determine the effectiveness of your security posture:

1. Cyber security threats are growing in frequency and sophistication, making it increasingly challenging to gain a holistic view (Symantec Internet Security Threat Report 2016).
2. Security products are highly specialized and siloed resulting in an overwhelming stream of notifications and alerts that are hard to prioritize due to their limited scope and visibility.
3. Risk assessments are traditionally manual, time consuming, and incomplete. And most are based on questionnaires that are outdated before they are even finished.
4. And finally, gauging effectiveness is difficult without a point of reference in the same industry or region.

What is Risk Insight?

Risk Insight is an automated assessment and planning tool that helps you build a more robust security posture. It complements the other products in your security arsenal to protect, detect, and respond to threats.  It does so by using the data generated by your existing products so that you can pinpoint vulnerabilities and create action plans that will ultimately lead to the better protection of your organisation.  Risk Insight uses big data analytics and sophisticated algorithms to present the risks you are facing in an intuitive, actionable fashion useful for both executives and operations teams.  Let’s walk through some ways Risk Insight helps you assess your business risk.

A 360 Degree View of Risk

Risk Insight uses an executive dashboard to provide your security leadership and operations teams with a 360 degree view of your security posture across your enterprise, industry peers, customers – and soon partners.

It has the unique ability to combine and analyse your enterprise attack and defense data, customer device hygiene, and our global threat intelligence to provide intuitive metrics that offer a true view of risk. Additionally, the easy to understand metrics allow you to effectively communicate the ROI of your security investments to your executive team and your business priorities to operations, enhancing transparency across the various layers of your security organisation.

Risk Insight allows you to make more informed, data-driven decisions and answer questions such as:

• What risk do your customers and partners pose to your organisation?
• How are you doing compared to your industry? Are there areas for improvement?
• How have changes in your defense improved your security posture and can you justify new security investments?

Actionable Insights for Operations Teams

Ultimately the questions arise: why are we performing poorly compared to the industry average? What is making that particular endpoint so much more vulnerable?  And perhaps most importantly, where should we focus to have the greatest impact?  These questions inevitably fall to the operations teams. Risk Insight offers interactive drill down and granular analysis capabilities to provide security operations with the ability to identify your most vulnerable endpoints, riskiest users, applications, customers and suppliers – always using real-world data.

Through risk scoring, Risk Insight can help you prioritise your efforts to create detailed action plans.  It then tracks the results of your actions over time and displays the information using intuitive trending graphs.  These graphs make it easy to digest months of data and compare your results against industry and geographic benchmarks.

An Automated Service That Makes your Existing Investments Work Harder

Risk Insight is an automated service, powered by your current security investments like Symantec Endpoint Protection, and fed by the unparalleled data visibility of the largest civilian global intelligence network in the world – which means you can base your important decisions on the best data available.

As a cloud-based service Risk Insight is available from anywhere, on any device; and you always have the latest up to date view of your internal and external risk.

And best of all being able to implement Risk Insight without adding agents, infrastructure, or substantial resource commitments means you can maximise the value of your existing security investments with no operational overhead.

Being Better Prepared Means Better Protected

We have seen time and again that organisations who adopt a proactive stance toward security are ultimately better able to protect themselves from the ever changing threat landscape.  Risk Insight allows you to make that transition from reactive to proactive.