Move faster with a better map.

Your security team can move faster, it just needs a better map. Engineering teams talk about “velocity” in a way that security teams rarely do. Improving MTTD and MTTR means reacting quicker but that’s not forward motion. If you want to improve the velocity of your security organization, Material Security CEO Ryan Noon has a good piece of advice.

In his post on “The Map and the Artillery”, he suggests thinking in terms of “what you know” and “what you do about it”. This perspective encourages your team to take ownership over what they know- about the environment, the entities and how they’re interacting. That’s your map.

What’s scary is how poor our maps tend to be. When we plan our security strategy in terms of tools, it’s easy to assume that the information we need to do our job is out there somewhere across our tools. Then what happens? We bump into obstacles. We experience a lot of friction. As a result, our velocity sucks.

The alternative is to strike a better balance between your map and your artillery. You probably have no shortage of “artillery” already, meaning tools for taking action. But a powerful map that provides reliable visibility will help your team move faster. With everyone pulling in the same direction with less friction, the team’s velocity will improve. You’ll be moving faster and able to do more with less.

A practical way to get started is to choose security solutions that cover critical areas while feeding your source of truth. Material Security does that by protecting Google and Microsoft accounts while recording in detail the landscape and activity from those environments. It’s visibility that the providers themselves fail to provide. And Material organizes all of that information neatly in your security data lake. They continuously map out one of the most sensitive and frequently attacked corners of your environment.

I think that’s a great way to start your map with a tangible improvement to “what you know” and they also do a good job with automation and interfaces that improve “what you do about it”. If you have Snowflake, Material Security will be able to do all of that for you on your existing Data Cloud account.

Read Ryan Noon’s full post at: https://material.security/blog/material-and-snowflake