Traditional vs Modern-day Cyber Ranges

Traditionally, large military and commercial organizations have used these expensive, large-investment, virtual environments for testing their infrastructure and security technologies. These would be ideal or feasible for any organization looking into the important aspects of their mission-critical applications and their availability and capability to be hosted in a virtual environment.

The traditional cyber ranges have helped organizations study the effectiveness of their cybersecurity technologies and manage their configuration and administration. However, what was missing was the last line of defense, including Security Operation Centre (SOC) analysts and incident response professionals and their preparedness and training due to high costs and lack of trained professionals to execute it. The traditional cyber range has evolved to the next-gen cyber range with a focus on the gaps of the traditional cyber range.

Rise of the Modern-day/Next-gen Cyber Range

• It focuses on people in the SOC and aims to replicate the physical SOC as a virtual SOC. It is customized to an organization’s infrastructure with limited licensed versions of tools the SOC analyst may be using and mimics a real-world SOC environment. This enables the leadership in organizations to evaluate skills of their SOC analysts.
• It includes a dedicated network that can emulate an organization's network. This virtual network environment is injected with traffic to simulate user emails, web surfing, server communications, and other network operations, which ensures that SOC analysts can see how a real-world cyberattack affects an organization's network operations and plan accordingly.
• A cloud-based and customizable one allows companies to design production and proprietary processes.
• It is easily deployable and configurable and allows organizations to test vulnerabilities and prepare their SOC analysts to be abreast with technology.
• It assists SOC analysts in improving their cyberattack detection, response, and remediation, and address the cybersecurity skills shortage.

In short, the modern-day cyber range is an essential platform required for every organization to enable them to get a better understanding of their networks and helps them enhance the skill set of their security practitioners.

Key Benefits of a Cyber Range

• Provides training platform for in-house cyber security teams
• Acts as an environment to improve teamwork and team capabilities
• Replicates a near-live network and helps their security teams identify possible vulnerabilities
• Provides an environment to try and test new ideas or technologies before the deployment and their capabilities
• Improves understanding of counter-cyber warfare.
• Provides real-time feedback on skills and gaps of employees
• Helps in security testing, where system and application simulations are tested and security attacks are carried out against them in a controlled way to identify potential vulnerabilities before deployment and use
• Enhances cyber capabilities of security professionals and advanced training environments
• Improves the cyber resilience of an organization and provides them the ability to respond and be able to sustain a security incident or cyberattack, while maintaining its ability to deliver its core business services
• Tests the capabilities of new recruits before they are employed

Over the last few years, a lot of efforts have been made by organizations globally, especially in the productizing of cyber range technologies and initiatives taken both nationally and internationally. Some of the key drivers that are responsible for this growth are as follows:

• Cyber being recognized as a separate domain of warfare
• Widespread adoption of cloud technology
• Increase in the number of cyberattacks and their frequency
• Domain-focused cyber attacks
• Need for the protection of organization/ national cyberspaces and cyber assets
• Ever-evolving and changing technology
• Need to train and prepare your cyber defenses
• Different faces of attackers with dedicated focussed attacks on acting as a major enabler for cyber ranges to develop
• Ability to emulate new technologies and test technologies in the shortest period and costs
• A better understanding of your cyber terrain and the ability to emulate it before putting the network into production
• Having training modules that meet the organization’s requirements

We have now a clear picture of the cyber range and why we need one. Before moving forward, we need to identify the cyber range type that varies depending on the needs of the user or the number of users it can support. We shall discuss this in our next blog.