Applying The Pareto Principles To Increase Effectiveness

As we move into post Covid-19, enterprises will review their business continuity plans and put more resources into monitoring and managing business risks. This is a response to the effect of this pandemic resulting in business closures and record job losses. This risk exposed the reality that businesses lacked sufficient contingency and fallback plans.

Unknown and hidden vulnerability also makes it more difficult for businesses to recover quickly while still susceptible to other business disruptions. Regulated industries will be concerned that such vulnerability will cause hefty financial penalties and additional audits. What is less obvious, but eventually costlier, is that these vulnerabilities can leave an organization susceptible years down the road.

Organizations can invest in Threat and Vulnerability Management (TVM) solutions to understand their exposure to risk. However, many are also realizing that it's nearly impossible to address the explosion of vulnerabilities they're suddenly detecting. A TVM solution might be a step in the right direction, but organizations also need to approach their risk posture more strategically. Here, Incident Monitoring and Response (IMR) solutions may be the better answer.

Research indicates that the majority of risk (about 80 percent) is sourced to a fraction of vulnerabilities (20 percent or less). Organizations need to prioritize the incidents that these vulnerabilities expose to highest risk. By focusing on critical flaws with the potential for damage, enterprises can make a huge dent in business risk while also streamlining incident management processes.

Incident management and the Pareto Principle

In light of these threat trends, it's not surprising that enterprises are paying more attention to their risk posture and actively monitoring business risks — these risks may incur from incidents surrounding the external and operating environment.

To start, organizations need to understand the Pareto Principle — otherwise known as the 80-20 rule — and how it applies to their threat environment. At a high level, roughly 80 percent of the effects or results are attributed to 20 percent of the causes or invested input.

It is a universal concept that also applies to users' vulnerability environment. From a risk standpoint, approximately 80 percent of risks can be traced back to just 20 percent of the vulnerabilities.

Incident Management and Response (IMR) systems provide an end-to-end solution that tracks events and collects data from edge devices and sensors. These data are monitored in real-time against a list of incidents with smart risk profiling. This solution can be implemented in a private network or cloud environment and scale as it grows.

Automation is not an option but a necessity for any organization attempting to get ahead of their business. Business Continuity and Risk Automation gives organizations the ability to streamline the process of operationalizing their security solutions according to policies and effective response procedures — including edge device and sensor data mapping, data aggregation and filtering, pre-built workflows, policy-based notification, self-service reporting and dashboards, and UI customization.

Risk scoring and analytics

For organizations, one of the biggest priorities is board reporting — quick and easy access to dashboards and heat maps generated in near real time. They need the ability to easily slice and dice risk intelligence for business leaders, security personnel and operational teams — assembling vulnerability and threat intelligence feeds into comprehensive analytics that reflect their own business-specific risk likelihoods and impacts.

Modern analytics are mandatory for enterprises to quickly visualize business-critical risk and make remediation immediately actionable — leveraging scoring algorithms that quantify and prioritize vulnerabilities based on business requirements, threat exploits, and vulnerability impacts.

Organizations can't manage what they can't see. A big picture of the risk environment is a start. But ultimately, honing in on the most important 20 percent by understanding where to look and what to look at will offer a crucial leg up in managing the threats and vulnerabilities that have the potential to cause the most damage.