As we move into 2025, the global threat landscape continues to deepen and evolve. The more interconnected our physical and digital spaces become, the more that a threat to either a physical or cyber asset signifies a potential attack on both fronts. This is especially true for systems that support the critical infrastructure upon which society relies for basic necessities like water, electricity, internet connectivity, communication, and more.
According to a February 2024 report by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), these “cyber-physical systems” are “increasingly vulnerable to threats from nation-states, terror groups, criminals, a range of natural disasters, as well as accidents and failures.” It also highlights the limits of preventability, citing: “[We must]… acknowledge that we cannot make all our infrastructure impervious to every threat or hazard.”
Most importantly, the report sounded a clarion call for the fortification of resilience for critical infrastructure in response to growing threats, “…to protect ourselves where the cyber and physical interact.” It closed its executive summary by extending its stated goals well beyond government as it implored: “We encourage both public and private sector organizations to use this report as a foundation to broaden and intensify their resilience initiatives.”
With this directive in mind, and as your organization’s physical assets become more integrated with your digital infrastructure, the best way to protect both points of entry at once is with more fully integrated resilience software solutions that are as innovative and complex as the threats you face. For ongoing security operations, the most technologically advanced solution designed and built to meet the needs of the moment is security incident management software.
Security incident management software enables your security operations team to detect both physical and cyber threats in real time, helping them to manage and resolve threats faster. By organizing your security operations strategy around an “always-on” integrated solution, you’ll help your teams to better mitigate risk and minimize damage from targeted internal threats, targeted external threats, and natural disasters that affect whole areas at a time.
To understand how security information management software can help your organization improve its resilience posture, we’ll cover just what security information management software is, which benefits it brings to your security operations strategy — such as optimizing real-time threat detection — and what to look for when choosing a provider.
What is security information management software?
Security information management software is a suite of digital tools designed to help your security operations teams to observe, identify, track, manage, and resolve threats to your personnel, physical assets, or cyber assets before they become attacks on safety or integrity. By maintaining awareness of threats in real time, your teams can more adeptly assess risks, anticipate and defuse attacks, and prevent the danger and disruption that would follow.
The benefits of security incident management software
The success of your organization’s security operations strategy is dependent on the ability of your teams to gather and interpret information, work proactively to identify and disable threats before they evolve, and respond quickly and effectively to adverse incidents. Security incident management software streamlines these actions within an interconnected space to improve overall situational awareness, threat attribution, and communication between stakeholders.
Improved risk management
Assessing and managing the risk of a potential threat begins when your team notices something suspicious in the vicinity of your physical or cyber assets. The team member who notates the observation works in real time to create an entry within your organization’s security incident management software, including every relevant piece of information they can perceive, and can attach pictures or media for context.
Security risk management software also integrates real-time information from credible outside streams and sources, such as news agencies, weather reports, and regulatory groups. This gives your team valuable context when determining whether an event is merely an innocuous anomaly or an observation worthy of logging and tagging for further evaluation.
Logging every observation with a clear record gives your team greater situational awareness for the physical and cyber spaces over which they’re responsible for maintaining security. The more thoroughly your team detects and records events of note, the more thorough your overall risk assessment and risk management postures become.
As there’s no limit to how many observations that can be logged, they should log each one with the same vigor and level of detail. Observation records can be visited later to evaluate and improve logging procedures and risk assessment and risk management protocols.
Earlier threat detection
Once an observation is recorded, your team can collaborate to efficiently review all logged observations at once, discuss all available information, and decide next steps for each one. If an observation is determined to be an innocuous event, its record can be labeled as such but remain in the system for later reference. This way, if an observation recurs, its frequency will be recorded, providing valuable context that can affect the threat level you associate with it.
If an observation is determined to pose a real and present threat, team members can change its status from observation to threat within the security incident management software and elevate its threat level as the situation warrants. This shifts the approach to this event from observation and review to active response. This change is also logged as part of the event’s record and can also inform future reviews of your team’s threat detection protocol.
If a threat is clear from the start, it can immediately be logged as a threat and move to action. But by offering space, forms, and procedures for your team to log and review all observations early and often, security risk management software gives them valuable time to determine which pose credible threats and work proactively to prioritize and defuse them accordingly.
Faster incident response
After an event has been upgraded to an active threat, it’s time for your team to take action. Every minute that your team saves by addressing a threat more quickly is another chance they have to prevent a potentially devastating incident before it occurs.
To help your team defuse threats faster, security incident management software comes pre-populated with templated incident action plans designed to address different categories of common threats. By applying all available information against the template, the team can confirm the efficacy of the proposed action plan, understand what info they still need to gather, and how many resources may be needed to effectively negate the threat.
If the threat in question doesn’t fall neatly into a category of common threats for which a template is available, security incident management software makes it easy to quickly build and initiate an action plan that corresponds more directly to that threat’s unique attributes.
Enhanced compliance
There are a number of regulations that require organizations to maintain a specific level of transparency about security threats, with governing agencies or the public, or else risk losing funding or receiving other penalties. The threat logging, threat intelligence, and reporting capabilities of security incident management software makes it simple to generate required documentation to meet these compliance metrics and keep relevant parties informed.
The best example of such regulation is the Clery Act. This regulation requires US colleges and universities to maintain a daily crime log, compile and distribute an annual security report (ASR) with three years of campus crime statistics, send notifications about active crime threats, and document new campus safety initiatives and improvements, to name just a few.
What to look for in your security incident management software
Threats to your organization’s security can appear at any time — and with cyberattacks, can originate from anywhere in the world. For security information management software to deliver the real-time detection capability required of an integral element of your organization’s security operations strategy, your software must be both versatile enough to account for any threat and intuitive enough to encourage team members to use it frequently and thoroughly.
The best security incident management software should let your team:
- Keep each other informed with effortless report creation and sharing throughout or across teams via QR codes, SMS, or a secure mobile application
- Optimize situational awareness with customizable dashboards that integrate real-time news, weather, geographic, and meteorological data from credible sources and feeds
- Stay on top of potential threats to people, assets, and reputation with AI-driven threat intelligence that streamlines escalation and support effective incident response
- Manage persons, organizations, and assets of interest and send notices to teams as needed with up-to-date intelligence that supports better decision-making
- Prevent incident recurrence and improve response with more thorough post-event learnings from incident investigations, including easy-to-record case notes
- Respond to incidents more efficiently and expedite recovery through customizable workflows with automated notifications and detailed response action assignments
- Gain valuable, actionable insights from post-event data with interactive dashboards, charts, maps, and shareable custom reports for stakeholders or key decision-makers
Even a practiced security team can overlook, misinterpret, or fail to disseminate critical info that could cause an event to be appropriately treated as a threat and handled accordingly. But security workforce management software improves your overall resilience posture by building on your teams’ skills with thoughtfully executed organization and utility, from real-time detection during active threats to post-incident analysis to help stem the next threat sooner.
Don’t wait until your next security incident occurs, though — request a demo of Noggin today and stay one step ahead.
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