ENGAGEMENT
A Fortune 100 telecom needed to better understand its security risk profile across assets and applications. DayBlink Consulting aggregated data from dozens of systems using Kafka pub/sub pipelines and direct API integrations. We transformed and flattened the data to prepare it for Tableau reporting. Finally, to ensure the metrics were always up to date, we designed and built automatically refreshed dashboards to report the cybersecurity metrics. Using the reports, our client was able to prioritize risk remediation efforts across 100s of teams responsible for managing infrastructure and software.
PROBLEM
The company faced significant issues with its existing cybersecurity metrics reporting, leading to a lack of trust and confidence from application and operational teams as well as accountable executives. The metrics relied on datasets with incomplete information that made it difficult to integrate them or determine metric compliance. Many datasets relied on manual entry, updates and exceptions. This fragmentation hampered our client’s ability to get a cohesive view of their true cybersecurity performance. Additionally, minor modifications sometimes took months to implement, and the workflow would often break. Adding to the problem, it was unclear if metrics reflected the latest progress, what calculations determined compliance, and what applications or assets were in scope. This not only frustrated executives but teams and fix agents struggled to effectively interpret the necessary actions they should take to improve security compliance.
SOLUTION
DayBlink Consulting implemented a comprehensive solution designed to enhance data integrity and metric reliability. We simplified and streamlined their metric reporting structure, enabling changes to be implemented and deployed within days instead of months. Our solution consisted of creating a comprehensive data-lake where over 50 disparate datasets were integrated. Automation was implemented to refresh these datasets regularly, thus maintaining data accuracy and reducing the manual workload. We conducted detailed working sessions with the Security team to break down and validate each metric. This involved identifying and confirming the denominator for each metric and understanding the compliance criteria. Our team developed sophisticated data aggregation pipelines to consolidate and join the disparate datasets. This was crucial for calculating each metric accurately. To provide actionable insights, we designed and developed Business Intelligence (BI) reporting dashboards. These dashboards enabled stakeholders to drill down into the data, offering deeper insights and facilitating better decision-making. Moreover, our team crafted comprehensive documentation that provided stakeholders with complete transparency on metric calculations and what would be required to improve the metric performance. We also established a streamlined change management process, facilitating desired changes and ensuring that all stakeholder approvals were secured to more efficiently get changes into production.
RESULT
The impact of our solution was immediate and well received by our client’s leadership team. We provided real-time reporting and visibility into each Security Metric, allowing teams to respond more rapidly and effectively to security issues. With accurate and up-to-date data, teams were able to improve security compliance more swiftly, thereby reducing the company’s overall risk profile. Daily data source refreshes through automation ensured data integrity and minimized human error. This meant that security team resources spent less time combing through spreadsheets to identify why a metric changed. The BI reporting dashboards provided stakeholders with the tools needed to explore data thoroughly and develop tactical plans for enhancing and improving security compliance.
Our solution also significantly reduced the time and effort required to manage and analyze security metrics. By leveraging automated data refreshes and intuitive BI reporting dashboards, we empowered the security team to focus on strategic improvements, ultimately strengthening the company’s security posture and mitigating risks more effectively.