Security Graphs Explained: An Innovative Approach To Network Security

Forbes

01-07-2025

Ben Verghese is Chief Technology Officer of Illumio.
Imagine standing atop a mountain, gazing at the vast landscape below, trying to make sense of the world around you. For centuries, explorers relied on such vantage points to map their surroundings. Now, fast forward to the age of technology, where mountain peaks have been traded in for satellites orbiting Earth, offering an unparalleled view from above.
This technological leap has transformed how we perceive and navigate our world, driving the advancement of digital maps and geographic information systems (GIS). These innovations help us visualize complex data, optimize routes and make smarter, more informed decisions in our personal lives as well as in business.
From Peaks To Pixels
Maps have evolved from simple navigation tools into essential resources for understanding our environment. Google Maps, for instance, started as a basic navigation tool featuring street views. Over time, it's transformed into a comprehensive resource, offering traffic updates, points of interest and real-time navigation. With the addition of more context and data, Google Maps now provides various layers, including 2D street maps, satellite views, Street View, terrain and traffic, each offering a unique perspective. By integrating these enriched layers, users can access a more detailed and useful view tailored to their needs.
While routine navigation tools are important for everyday use, battlefield maps are crucial for military planning and operations. Achieving a strategic advantage requires accurate maps that detail where assets are located and activities are occurring. The extent of this advantage is determined by the accuracy of the data and the time invested in enriching, understanding and utilizing these maps.
These same principles are now being applied in the digital world. Just as battlefield maps enable commanders to make tactical and strategic decisions, security graphs are important for security teams to gain insights into the complexities of today's interconnected world.
Turning Data Into Insights
The scale of operations in large and mid-size companies requires extensive connectivity to support various business functions, communication and data management. With thousands of connected devices and systems, visualizing and understanding these connections and potential threats is challenging. This is where the value of a security graph becomes evident.
A security graph provides real-time, data-driven insights and a comprehensive view of the network environment, enabling security teams to shift from a slow defensive response to proactive breach containment. Because malware often spreads by exploiting communication and access across multiple layers, integrating diverse data such as application-level insights, network traffic, identity and access information into the security graph is essential. The richer the data, the more effective the graph becomes at detecting and mitigating threats. Achieving this requires vendors to collaborate and integrate a diverse range of security-related data to enhance the security graph's ability to accurately reflect the customer's environment and activity.
Integrating AI into a security graph further enhances its benefits by enabling the auto-discovery of useful context information. Early detection reduces the mean time to detect (MTTD) malicious activities and allows for quick containment and greater cyber resilience.
As digital environments grow increasingly complex, security graphs are quickly becoming indispensable for understanding system access and network activity and empowering security teams to better anticipate, detect and contain breaches. Staying informed about these advancements is essential for those shaping strategy and making decisions in today's evolving cybersecurity landscape.
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