Unified Security: Bridging the Gaps with a Defense-in-Depth Approach
The identity is the main attack vector for cybercriminals, with cybercriminals using stolen identity to infiltrate the organization, move laterally and vertically throughout the organization, and extract data, deploy ransomware, establish backdoors, and cause major service disruptions. All with long term impact to organizations.
The Risks with Siloed Security
Many organizations approach endpoint identity security in a siloed manner, tackling their individual problems with different tactics and solutions, thinking that they are resolving all the issues that they face, when in fact, this creates even bigger problems. From the 2025 CyberArk Identity Security Landscape report, 68% of respondents reported that the lack of integration of their identity and security tools hinders their efforts to detect attacks. This siloed approach can cause cracks in the organization’s security posture, because separate systems and processes aren’t in communication with each other. This allows for a multitude of gaps that put the organization at risk, including:
- Detection Gaps: separate tools detect different threats. When they live in separate silos, there isn’t a holistic view of the situation, and sometimes this lets threats slip through the cracks and go unnoticed.
- Disruption of Business Processes: currently, when an organization detects a threat from an EDR solution, Security Operations Center (SOC) analysts can either isolate the machine from the network or respond while the machine is connected. Neither option is ideal, with the first causing disruption in business processes, and the second giving threat actors time to carry out their attacks.
- Data Fragmentation: silos around data are also present, and when data is stored in various repositories, it’s difficult to complete a threat analysis that is accurate, which can delay responses to security threats. Usually, the only way to combine this data is through manual correlation, which is inefficient and can take far longer than security teams have to detect a risk pattern.
There have been multiple cyberattacks in recent years that help prove that this siloed approach isn’t helping defend against threats. One U.S. hospital recently suffered from a ransomware attack affecting 670,000 patients, discovering that this exfiltration of data had been happening since May 2023.
Most organizations likely have some security processes and solutions in place, if that is the case, how are these attacks going undetected for so long? Or… is one system holding data that could detect it… but due to silos systems and processes, can’t share this information to provide the holistic insight necessary to detect, alert and defend against these and future attacks. Is this siloed process of systems making it difficult to even respond to threats without causing disruption to the organization? There are layers in your security process that need to communicate to allow for a defense-in-depth strategy that allows for detection tools to utilize data, find trends that will detect risk, and allow SOC analysts to take action to contain threats without causing disruption.
The Value of Defense-in-Depth
Utilizing a defense-in-depth strategy allows for these layers of systems to communicate with each other, breaking down the silos of detection, response, data and analytics, to provide SOC analysts with the most accurate information and mitigation tactics regarding potential threats to their organization.
- Improved detection and reduction of false positives: with historical data analytics of past risks, trends can be detected, and security systems can update policies as necessary.
- Streamlined operations and reduced workload for SOC teams: when silos are broken down between systems, manual processes are no longer needed. More time focusing on mitigating potential risks without disruption to workflows and not trying to filter through various data repositories looking for a needle in the haystack.
- Proactive threat hunting and risk identification: with the ability to understand threats from all sides, a proactive approach can be taken to finding risk, not waiting to take action to mitigate an attack that has already happened.
CyberArk and Palo Alto Networks Cortex: Helping You Bridge the Gap
Solution integration is key to breaking down these silos and implementing a successful defense-in-depth strategy to secure endpoints. Combining to bring a multi-layered approach to endpoint security, CyberArk Endpoint Privilege Manager (“EPM”) and Palo Alto Networks Cortex bring together proactive defense-in-depth capabilities with industry-leading detection and response, offering centralized visibility, streamlined operations, automated remediation, and the ability to adapt to evolving security challenges.
With CyberArk EPM, organizations can proactively defend the endpoint, through implementing least privilege access, removing local admin rights and enforcing application control, with detailed logging of privileged actions on the endpoint. With the ability to manage user privileges, SOC analysts can limit or completely halt elevations to force a user into non-admin, containing threats without disruption.
Palo Alto Cortex XSIAM can ingest these logs and utilize AI-driven analytics to correlate the EPM logs with other security data to proactively hunt for threats, identify suspicious activities, and trigger automated responses to mitigate potential incidents. The combination of these two solutions allows for smooth, secure processes for securing identities and proactively alerting to organizations of potential risk.
Bridge the Gap to Protect Endpoints
It’s a big elephant, and organizations need to secure it holistically, rather than looking at each piece individually to discern how to secure it. With a defense-in-depth approach, where solutions work together to provide proactive security, and the ability to review and learn from endpoint access data, organizations can confidently secure their endpoints.
With a unified approach with CyberArk EPM and Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSIAM, organizations can achieve a more comprehensive and effective security strategy, addressing the challenges posed by siloed security systems, and enhancing the ability to detect and respond to cyber threats.
Learn more about this integration here
Allison Senatore is a product marketing manager at CyberArk.
John Moran is a Director of Technical Partnerships, Cortex at Palo Alto Networks
