As the name implies, observability is organizations’ ability to visualize and capture complex issues and potential threats throughout their networks, cloud environments, and applications. Traditional continuous monitoring, powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), relies on processed telemetry, rules, and policies to detect and respond. Observability is about giving the organization additional real-time insight before detecting security incidents.
Spotting potential issues and gaining more comprehensive visibility allows companies to resolve them quickly.
Are you planning to increase your enterprise’s observability? Partnering with a reputable cybersecurity company, such as Forenova, enhances threat detection and provides valuable insights.
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What is Cybersecurity Observability?
Observability starts with deploying technology to expand the ability to collect telemetry from all enterprise devices, applications, systems, and data sources. By capturing a vast amount of telemetry, this function provides the enterprise with the means to see more of their environment in a simplified manner.
Observability is quickly becoming critical in helping organizations improve their key performance indicators, including Mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) and Mean-Time-To-Resolve (MTTR). Organizations leverage observability to help increase the speed and efficiency in resolving threats.
This increase in speed to detect and resolve becomes a critical component supporting threat detection. This support for detection also helps support the organization’s need to meet compliance mandates. Observability tools are crucial for organizations to comply with privacy and legal mandates, including GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS.
Migration to Advanced Observability
Advanced observability enhances traditional monitoring through sophisticated data analysis. This evolution is driven by greater adoption of advanced threat detection technologies, more advanced endpoint detection and response capabilities, and increases in better threat intelligence sources.
AI also plays a critical role by becoming more embedded with observability tools. Real-time monitoring, faster data processing, and constant evolution for organizations wanting to move from a reactive to a proactive security posture recognize the importance of observability’s technology advancement for cybersecurity.
Importance of Observability in Cybersecurity
Observability is critical in improving even automated incident response powered by AI. Collecting all telemetry, cybersecurity-related or not, helps provide far greater early visibility to future events. SecOps teams leveraging actionable insights from observability can now feed this telemetry into their LLM tools to help improve incident response automation.
Observability is quickly becoming critical in helping organizations improve their key performance indicators, including Mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) and Mean-Time-To-Resolve (MTTR). Organizations leverage observability to help increase the speed and efficiency in resolving threats.
How does Observability Enhance Proactive Threat Detection?
A critical enhancement to current threat detection capabilities comes from actionable insights created by observability tools. These actionable insights help provide visibility to anomalies happening in real time. This early warning ability becomes a critical data source for threat detection solutions.
Thus, observability helps prevent minor anomalies from escalating into significant incidents. Observability enhanced current detection functions by delivering actionable insights. Without observability, the SecOps team continues to deal with alert fatigue from increased attack velocity.
Leveraging Observability to Solve Alert Fatigue
Alert fatigue even among the managed service community is a problem. SecOps engineers must become far more engaged on attack incidents cause this high-valued team to burn-out and quit their profession.
Observability’s actionable insights help improve SecOps workflows to help reduce the manual incident response intervention by their engineers.
These insights fed directly into the detection layer helps provide far more deeply analysis of an anomaly behavior. This knowledge interjection improves automation, speeds up response times, and provides a much faster end-result analysis that feeds into the threat intelligence and modeling tools.
By fully automating these workflows, SecOps engineers can focus on more strategy projects and a higher level of overwatch.
Real-time Insights and Analysis
Observability detects threats and enables preventive controls by tracking infrastructure vulnerabilities. Organizations receive alerts to address these issues before attackers exploit them.
Improving an organization’s security posture reduces risks by preventing incidents and closing potential attack gaps.
Integration of Observability in MDR Services
Observability must cover all infrastructure, from cloud to on-premises, ensuring no cybersecurity blind spots and minimizing undetected vulnerabilities. This holistic view enables teams to act against threats, enhancing organizational cyber resilience.
Another critical aspect of merging observability into managed detection and response (MDR) by collecting valuable additional telemetry from high-value enterprise assets, including customer data, public-facing websites, and internal intellectual property.
This advanced collection progress enhances incident response by providing actionable data for security events. Security teams with timely, data-driven insights can respond faster to minimize potential damage, creating a cohesive approach to threat management.
Observability offers detailed data critical for incident analysis to MDR platforms like NovaMDR.
What are the Challenges of Observability When Working with MDRs?
Observability tools deliver value regarding providing actionable insight. Like other cybersecurity tools, observability solutions generate considerable telemetry data. This additional data collection can overwhelm many organizations not prepared to receive, store, process, and remove telemetry information in due course. Organizations that invest in observability recognize this as a very sizable expense. A complete enterprise-wide solution requires capital for licensing, implementation, and hiring experienced engineers or contracting out to an MDR provider.
Another element of observability is the challenges requiring privacy and consideration of regulations. Observability’s core focus is to collect vast amounts of data to help provide valuable actionable insights for cybersecurity and application performance.
Organizations must establish governance policies to ensure this new capability collects data while respecting users’ privacy and not jeopardizing compliance mandates or regulatory issues.
Data Migration From Several Sources
Integrating data from various sources into a single observability system is complex and requires careful management to avoid overloading IT infrastructure and to ensure data integrity. Simplifying this integration is essential for timely monitoring and action.
Observability requires an extensive amount of data to be relevant. Data sources originating from different areas within the enterprise. Collecting too much data continues to be a reason for resistance to installing observability tools.
Balancing Cost and Value
Observability delivers optimal value to an organization, especially considering the increase in the volume of adversarial AI attacks. Organizations must extend their governance frameworks to better realize the cost of collecting observability telemetry and the meaningful impact this tool has on improving MTTD and other KPIs.
Organizations considering observability need to consider starting with a smaller subset of tools with a measurable expectation regarding improving the organization’s current and future cybersecurity posture.
The initial observability deployment helps establish a critical guardrail by targeting specific high-value corporate assets. This protection will help limit the data collected from key resources and the insights gained. SecOps will view this additional stream using their extended detection and response (XDR) tools. This will help them evaluate whether the cost of the additional telemetry provided the expected value in improving the organization’s security posture.
Global Shortage of Talent Still A Challenge
Observability tools need skilled personnel for data collection and analysis. Because of a shortage of cybersecurity skills, many organizations struggle with implementation and ongoing security operations of observability tools and data.
MDR providers like Forenova have access to talented and experienced security operations engineers who can assist clients with their cybersecurity detection, prevention, and response journeys.
Future Trends in Cybersecurity Observability and MDR
Observability’s initial rollout followed similar paths to other advanced tools. Many tools use proprietary formats, data schemes, and user interface workflows.
One expected change to observability marketing is the adoption of Open Telemetry, or OTel. OTel is an open standard for collecting and routing telemetry data into open-source observability tools.
Open-source observability tools will continue to impact the industry positively. Organizations that want to collect telemetry from various assets can leverage platforms supporting the OTel framework. Open-source observability also helps organizations build their initial governance framework.
Open-source observability also integrates well with MDR providers like Forenova. By leveraging OTel formatting, Forenova extends the ability to ingest observability telemetry into the NovaMDR platform to complement its existing AI-powered incident response automation functionality.
Why Forenova?
Forenova, an award-winning managed detection and response (MDR) provider based in the European Union (EU), understands the criticality of stopping advanced cyber threats and seeing the constant changes in the cybersecurity landscape.
Preventing advanced attacks powered by adversarial AI requires layers of prevention technologies combined with expertise in security operations. Without proper visibility into networks and corporate digital assets, hackers will continue taking over devices, hijacking applications, and stealing data.
Want more helpful information about your company’s systems? Observability continues to become a strategy investment and focus for organizations witnessing dramatic increases in complex cyberattacks. Forenova’s continued innovation in managed detection and response offerings also recognizes the importance of greater visibility in enhancing automated incident and response offers embedded within their NovaMDR offering.
