Tag: incident

Building Digital Resilience: Strategies for Security Teams Under Pressure

As digital infrastructures expand, so too does the scope of risk. Enterprises no longer contend solely with perimeter breaches or isolated phishing attacks; they face a constantly shifting threat landscape shaped by geopolitics, emerging technologies, and the growing sophistication of adversaries. Security leaders are under pressure to adapt—not just reactively, but strategically.

Building resilience requires more than a solid firewall or frequent employee training. It’s about anticipating, responding, and recovering in a way that minimizes disruption and safeguards long-term operations. But doing so demands that cybersecurity programs mature beyond static controls and embrace continuous learning, contextual awareness, and intelligent prioritization.

Bridging the Gaps Between Risk, Strategy, and Action

Many organizations maintain a separation between risk governance and technical security operations. Compliance frameworks dictate controls, audits verify their implementation, and risk registers get updated annually. Meanwhile, security teams operate on a different cadence—responding to alerts, patching vulnerabilities, and investigating anomalies as they occur.

This disjointed approach leads to blind spots. Executives believe risk is under control because a framework has been followed. Security teams, however, may be aware of threats or attack paths that aren’t reflected in the documentation—or even properly understood by other departments.

Bridging this gap requires more than cross-functional meetings. It calls for a shared understanding of risk that is both technical and strategic. Security leaders must be fluent in the language of business impact, while decision-makers must recognize that cyber risks evolve faster than annual review cycles allow. When technical realities and business goals are misaligned, even a well-funded cybersecurity program can falter.

The Role of Contextual Awareness in Cyber Threat Intelligence and Incident Response

Security incidents don’t happen in a vacuum. Threat actors tailor their tactics based on industries, technologies, and even geopolitical developments. What matters is not just what happened, but why it happened, and what it means for future exposure.

This is where the convergence of cyber threat intelligence and incident response becomes critical. Together, they provide a cycle of insight and adaptation. Intelligence supplies the context—who is targeting your sector, what tools they use, and what signals might indicate reconnaissance or lateral movement. Incident response, on the other hand, applies that knowledge during high-pressure moments to reduce dwell time, contain impact, and improve response accuracy.

Organizations that invest in this synergy are better equipped to move beyond one-off incident reports. Instead, they build a threat-informed defense posture that continually adapts to new realities. This doesn’t require reinventing the SOC model, but it does mean integrating intelligence into both detection logic and post-incident reviews. The result is not just faster response—but smarter, more resilient defense cycles. [Insert link here]

Avoiding Tool Sprawl While Maximizing Operational Value

A common reflex when addressing gaps in security posture is to adopt new tools. Behavioral analytics, extended detection and response (XDR), and SOAR platforms all promise faster insights and better coordination. But without a clear integration plan, these technologies often introduce complexity faster than they add value.

Tool sprawl has both operational and psychological consequences. Analysts waste time switching between dashboards, reconciling conflicting alerts, or manually correlating data. Worse, leadership may assume that the presence of cutting-edge tools equates to effectiveness—when in reality, the team may be overwhelmed and underutilizing key capabilities.

The solution isn’t to avoid new technology altogether, but to pursue it deliberately. Start with clear objectives—what gap are you trying to close, and how will success be measured? Choose vendors that emphasize interoperability, not lock-in. And most importantly, invest in people. Even the most advanced threat detection platforms are only as effective as the analysts interpreting their output.

Building Toward a Culture of Preparedness

Cybersecurity has matured into a discipline of both prevention and recovery. As such, organizational culture matters as much as technology. Incident simulations should be routine, not exceptional. Cross-functional tabletop exercises should test both the technical and communicative response to hypothetical breaches. Post-mortems should be honest, blameless, and actionable.

Preparedness is not a state; it’s a practice. It involves executive buy-in, realistic planning, and a willingness to acknowledge uncertainty. No team can prevent every incident—but those that cultivate transparency, learning, and agility will fare far better when one occurs.

By focusing on strategic alignment, intelligent integration of threat intelligence and response, and a culture of readiness, organizations position themselves not only to endure attacks—but to emerge stronger from them.

Skills shortage and low budgets considered biggest challenges for managing incident detection and response

Integrity360, Ireland and the UK’s largest cyber security services specialist, has today announced findings from a Twitter poll gaining visibility into the value of managed detection and response services (MDR). The poll, with 2,000+ responses and conducted between 8-10 March, highlights the pitfalls of existing detection and response, with the skills shortage and low budgets cited as the biggest challenges when it comes to managed detection and response – 28% respectively.

Furthermore, a third (33%) of respondents believe that threat detection is lacking most when it comes to cyber security and incident detection and response. This was closely followed by training and testing (27%). Meanwhile 26% of respondents said slow response times and 18% selected lack of visibility.

Richard Ford, CTO, Integrity360, comments: “Preventative measures, to protect and prevent threats targeting our critical systems and data are important, but not enough in this increasingly sophisticated cyber threat landscape. Organisations need security solutions and services that are effective peri-incident, that can detect, analyse and respond to threats that have bypassed preventative controls – threats both internal and external. Training and testing of these solutions, including platform tuning and training employees, is equally critical to maintaining a strong security posture.

“There remains a huge skills shortage in the cyber security industry, and particularly in high value skills and experience such as threat detection and incident response. MDR helps close the gap. In fact, organisations bridging the skills gap and utilising MDR services have a 62% reduction in the average number of security incidents per year”.

The poll did reveal that respondents look set to take action to address issues around incident detection and response, agreeing that MDR should be prioritised and highlighting that they will allocate the most cyber security budget to managed security (29%). A further twenty five percent noted that cyber security testing (25%) would receive a budget boost.

This is positive given that four in ten (40%) believe cyber security testing is best outsourced over handling in-house. Additionally, over a third (35%) believe a service provider better manages cloud computing security.

It appears in-house approaches may also require investment or improvement with the poll revealing that almost a third (31%) of respondents said that thirty percent of their cyber security budget is allocated to tools and solutions that are not used to their full potential.

When it comes to what people see as the most damaging impact of a cyber security breach, financial loss came top of the list (46%), followed by loss of trust (28%). Meanwhile, reputational damage was selected by twenty percent of respondents.

Ford adds: “We’re currently experiencing a time of economic downturn, when cyber security budgets are tight, and risks are heightened. However, slashing cyber security budgets can put a company at risk of losing their cyber security professionals which are already in short supply and can result in gaps in an organisation’s defences. Organisations are visibly assessing the value and efficiency of their security solutions and it’s great to see that they are looking to put budgets to good use by investing money and trust in service providers.”

Further, the poll found that over a third (36%) see increased defences as the most significant benefit of cyber security collaboration, with (36%) also seeing faster response times as being the biggest benefit of a managed detection and response service.

Integrity360’s MDR offering delivers real-time threat detection, proactive threat hunting, incident containment and response, security incident analysis and threat intelligence, compliance reporting, and 24/7 monitoring to businesses across Ireland and the UK. As well as enhancing organisations’ detection and response capabilities and enabling the protection of systems and data, the service provides businesses with access to on-demand and proactive support via Integrity360’s experienced security team.

Integrity360 leverages the latest threat intelligence and state-of-the-art solutions to deliver its MDR service to identify new threat actor Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) across networks, endpoints, servers, and the cloud.

Integrity360 has also recently announced that it has been named as a Representative Vendor in the 2023 Gartner Market Guide for Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Services.

Ford added: “As cyber threats continue to evolve in frequency, sophistication and efficacy, companies must roll out a comprehensive service to meet their security needs. That’s where MDR comes in. Through our offering we aim to deliver even deeper technical expertise and innovative technologies which enable companies to secure their operations and allow us to serve as an extension of their team.”