• Situational Awareness is a compliance domain in the AESCSF framework, focused on collecting, analysing, and presenting operational and comprehensive cyber security information, to make informed choices in protecting your critical asset.  
• The implementation involves navigating the right tools or combination of solutions to turn raw data into actionable insights, and manage detected risks and vulnerabilities.
• Critical systems require ongoing intelligence through monitoring, analytics, and adapting defence strategies to the dynamic scenarios and emerging patterns.

What is Situational Awareness

Situational Awareness is a significant concept in the field of cyber security, gaining more traction over the recent years, but still not as widely adopted by the critical infrastructure industry.  

Under the AESCSF framework, Situational Awareness is defined as one of the 11 compliance domains, advising to “Establish and maintain activities and technologies to collect, analyse, alarm, present, and use operational and cybersecurity information, including status and summary information from the other model domains, to form a common operating picture (COP).”

An organisation’s Security Operations Centres (SOCs) deal with a lot of inflow of data and logs. So, there’s a need for synthesising the collected information and extracting meaningful insights, leading to hardening security controls.

Situational Awareness, at its core, is measuring ‘what is’ and controlling what ‘could be’.  

Rather than fixing what’s broken, it aims to detect and remediate threat prone areas in the OT and IT environment before it eventuates. Especially, for the complex IT systems in the case of mission-critical systems such as in the energy sector, Situational Awareness is a strategic necessity and not just an add-on, to make informed decisions and act fast. To do that, you need the toolkit and a mechanism to collect, consolidate, and comprehend information across servers, networks, devices, to get actionable insights.

Why Situational Awareness is Important for Your SOC? 

1. Visibility & Detection
   Situational Awareness tools offer you monitoring capabilities and device health checks across the network, in real-time. These platforms give you the complete picture of what needs mending, the root cause, and the next weak spot. Alerts are sent with associated risk rating or vulnerability severity level. Then the logs and data collected is run through consolidation and analysis processes.
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2. Risk Mitigation
   Switching from reactive to proactive approach begins with detecting areas that may be unattended or in a blind spot. Especially, in critical industry sectors, a single missed alert could cascade into a system-wide outage or security breach.
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3. Threat Management
   It is more than just sending alerts, it is about understanding and managing the threat exposure surface and hardening the complete security landscape by triaging alerts and reducing noise efficiently.
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4. Incident Response
   The element of Vulnerability Priority Rating (VPR) enables risk-based vulnerability management, helping organisations focus on what truly matters. 
   Identifying and prioritising threats before they escalate.

How is Situational Awareness Achieved?

Situational Awareness allows your SOC teams to make informed decisions based on continuous data, analysis, alert checks, and automating responses, for example quarantining compromised devices or blocking malicious accounts immediately, eventually reducing the risk prone areas for the future.  

There are many tools and technologies to implement this strategy, some of the commonly known solutions are as follows:

The organisations often implement SIEM and SOAR solutions in a combination to get the most out of their toolkit. Some of the emerging products may be new and ancillary to the previous instalments but need long-term planning in context to a specific environment and organisation’s security goals, instead of preferences based on the prevalent resources.

Building Better Business Intelligence with Situational Awareness

There are numerous advantages to the implementation of Situational Awareness and adherence to the regulatory requirements surrounding this domain under AESCSF than what is commonly addressed or discussed in the energy sector. However, it can start with in enabling organisations to evaluate their risks by undertaking tools and measures to understand data insights, identify threat-prone areas, mitigate them or offer response, in an agile manner.

Comprehensive dashboards give you better control over your servers, endpoints, network traffic, and system logs throughout your IT and OT infrastructure. The monitoring and device agents installed onsite capture raw data, and the software platforms translate it into context, which allow your security teams the following capabilities:  

• Spotting anomalies such as brute-force attacks or suspicious logins using behaviour analysis  
• Alerting and filtering by continuous and multi-layered monitoring
• Priority-rating eliminating alert fatigue and bringing only the complex and urgent issues to tackle
• Saving time and manual intervention with some level of automation
• Process improvement to stay ahead of the threats, building some foresight and frontline defence

Are you looking to embed Situational Awareness in your systems? We specialise in technologies and services to enhance your network architecture and cyber security posture. Let’s discuss how to establish and maintain it.