Everybody understands the importance of taking a proactive stance regarding our health. Instead of waiting for symptoms to appear before addressing them and seeing a doctor, many know that they should eat healthily, exercise regularly, and attend health check-ups annually. Despite this universal knowledge, many organisations fail to translate this into their operations and apply the same proactive principle to their security and operations.
Although many companies today get by with continually reacting to IT alerts, true security maturity entails utilising actionable alerts for a more proactive security posture that is far more effective and significantly reduces risk over time. In this article, we go over how businesses can be proactive in their approach to alerting and improving their overall security and daily operations.
Optimise Alert Management
Alerts are not all that useful without context. Therefore, whenever your IT teams need to triage an alert, they must have all the data necessary at hand to do their job. Otherwise, they cannot act quickly on how to best resolve an incident which could cause a bigger and unwanted impact on operations.
To accomplish this, organisations must first optimise their alerts and centralise them through alert management solutions such as SendQuick’s IT alert notification management platform. This IT alert management system integrates with many SaaS-based IT infrastructure monitoring tools (LogRhythm, Solarwinds, Fortinet, ManageEngine, etc.) as well as on-premises systems. Most importantly, it can be customised according to the business’s operational needs.
Thanks to its compatibility with numerous network management systems, IT teams can be immediately notified if the system is running sub-optimally or if employees are experiencing IT issues. With SendQuick’s solutions, IT and security alerts will flow into one place regardless of how many tools, workflows, and communication channels the organisation uses and complete with all the necessary data necessary to respond to alerts and notify stakeholders without needing to switch between numerous tools.
End Ad Hoc Alert Handling
The reactive monitoring process employed by many modern organisations typically involves generating alerts with little to no context, which is then reviewed ad hoc. This reduces efficiency in responding to everyday IT issues and critical threats. A better way would be to have alerts flow through an automated and standardised process for triage and response.
A formal and dedicated group should handle this initial triage and response, while a robust incident response plan defines the team’s processes. To ensure that stakeholders are kept in the loop, this group should be well-integrated with operations and engineering teams to address alerts and minimise risks. Ultimately, discussions between said groups must alter internal system and employee behaviours over time and de-risk the business.
Conduct a Response Audit
Despite taking all the fundamental steps to automate and streamline the company’s alert processes, more work is needed. First, the right processes are ultimately meaningless if the workforce does not follow them, so it is critical to conduct a response audit to create a review and analysis trail.
A comprehensive audit trail should enable the compliance or security team to later analyse actions taken via security tools, including:
- Who dismissed a given alert
- When it was dismissed
- What annotations were created
It is vital to regularly audit how teams respond to alerts to make sure that they are taking the proper actions. By having the results of these audits, top management can further improve their strategy and gradually transform the alerting process to be more proactive, all while reducing the overall risk.
Conclusion
Although these are only the general steps to adopt a more proactive approach to alert management and the organisation’s security, it is understandable to see this entire undertaking as somewhat overwhelming. Just like in the personal health analogy, we all aim to regularly exercise and eat a healthy and balanced diet, but it is often easier than done.
Thankfully, you don’t have to go at it alone as SendQuick is always ready to lend a helping hand. We provide innovative enterprise mobile messaging solutions – including IT alerts and notifications, business process automation, a reliable SNMP to SMS gateway in Singapore and more — geared towards providing security, preserving data confidentiality, and mitigating disruptions during unplanned system downtimes.
To learn more, head to our solutions page or contact us to speak with a SendQuick expert.
