Security validation provides every security practitioner with two critical elements of effectiveness - reliable data and the ability to prioritize.

Organizations have invested millions over the years in technology, consulting, and people often having to overcompensate for the fact that there was no reliable way to verify what was working, what was not, and how to prove they were getting value. But, in today’s business climate, validating security effectiveness is critical. Cyber-attacks are on the rise, the targets of those attacks are expanding, adversaries are more motivated, and their tactics are increasingly insidious.

Done right, continuous security validation, provides you with the ability to prioritize what is most important. It arms you with the data needed to optimize spend on your security stack by testing your configurations with real attacks, not simulations, to pinpoint which systems or tools are leaving assets at risk. It allows you to proactively identify configuration issues, identify who and what might be targeting your organization or industry so you can expose the gaps across your people, processes, and technology.

 Breach and attack simulation (BAS) solutions are widely used to test how security controls respond to specific exploits. They generate a binary pass/fail output that you can use to begin diagnosing how your controls are performing. And, while many BAS vendors label these solutions ‘security validation,’ the reality is that they are not. Why? Because the methodology for companies in the BAS category is to blast the environment with simulated - not real - attacks to generate binary pass/fail ratings. This approach does answer the important question, “Is my environment susceptible,” but the challenge is that, once you know that, you’re going to want to know “How did it get inside? How did my controls behave? Where and what can I do to fix it?” Breach and attack simulation or BAS products can’t tell you that because they don’t focus on how and what to do about your security controls.

Alternatively, security validation goes beyond a simple pass/fail rating by providing you with detailed information about how your controls behaved during the attack across the entire attack lifecycle, what happened, and what you need to do to fix it. And, it doesn’t stop there. Only security validation allows you to continuously measure if your security posture is regressing or improving over time and, again, what to do about it. Validation is a continuous, necessary practice that every security team should adopt.

Finally, Our Security Validation Solution allows you to leverage threat intelligence to assess the effectiveness of controls against specific types of attacks. In short, security validation is intelligence-led, autonomous, and automated, something no BAS solution can offer today.