Equating the belts, hoses, engine, and battery of a car to the human anatomy, an auto mechanic once boasted to a heart surgeon that their jobs were similar.
The heart surgeon considered the statement and said, “This would be true if you had to do your job while the car was on, and the engine was running.”
Like the heart surgeon, IT professionals and cybersecurity analysts face a similar challenge. The network is the lifeblood of business. However, the approach to protecting the network varies based on the requirements and the size of the business. For example, a large U.S. financial services organization may have a security operations center (SOC) team with hundreds of employees. A staff this size would be necessary as financial instruments contain personally identifiable information (PII) and can be used to steal cash. In contrast, a smaller business may have as few as three or four IT generalists. By day, these workers install CAT-5 cables, populate LDAP, and configure servers. But at night, they are running down anomalies and installing patches.