At most companies today, cybersecurity threats and digital vulnerabilities are becoming prevalent as a significant number of companies’ assets are created, stored, and exchanged in digital form. Furthermore, given a complicated supply chain where each link of the chain contains various layers of stakeholders across nations, the process of secure information is one of the big challenges, and no entity can ignore it anymore, especially when cyber attackers are evolving to be more sophisticated. Seeking solutions for cybersecurity is one of the priorities of the company.
But before we come to the final answer for a digital security question, companies must identify the root causes or have a detailed checking from their own systems to understand the current and predict future challenges. There are 3 most common issues facing by companies that weaken their ability to keep their digitized assets safe, as pointed out by research from McKinsey. These include:
- Employees’ failure to perform good data-hygiene practices as they still fall prey to simple errors such as clicking on innocent-seeming emails, downloading sensible-looking attachments, or disclosing their private information on fraudulent websites.
- Companies have been negligent in being proactive toward online security by abandoning their system for perimeter and encryption defenses such as firewalls. Raising the fence and leave it there is not enough in this digital world.
- IT departments are being exploited but provided with a limit of advanced resources. Besides the job of supporting IT solutions for the entire business, the IT department must prevent and detect illegal outsiders fearlessly and has a good understanding of which company’s assets are the most critical.
After re-evaluating the company’s system and practices, there are 6 solutions and practices your company can proceed to adopt.
1. be proactive to what is happening around your system (do not wait for them to come)
Although most business is already implementing firewall as a bar gate between the internet and its computer, one or two layers are now still not enough to protect data from sophisticated intruders. Therefore, employees in a company must actively examine everywhere (software or system) to pinpoint cyber risks and network vulnerabilities before they occur.
2. Build Data-driven cybersecurity tools in a real-time manner
Currently, this practice requires more advanced data-driven tools to detect cyber-attacks in advance. Artificial Intelligence is worth considering in this case. More specifically, an AI and ML ( machine leanrning) will be deployed to analyze threat and incident, test software, anticipate threats, perform security architecture, automatically respond to security incidents, and annalyze and visualize cybersecturity data.
3. Develop decoys to lure attackers
Decoy for servers and systems, a.k.a deceptions, are set up to silently allure and attract unauthorized users by distributing numerous system vulnerabilities traps; as a result, gaining a better understanding of the attacker’s identity, motives, purposes, the method used. By doing this, the IT security teams can enrich their threat intelligence with more focused data and plan for future plan.
4. Deploy ring architectures to store sensitive data
Ring architectures is a ring network in which each node of that network connects to exactly the other two nodes forming a circle-like form of network. This network allows organizations to store data in different layers based on the importance and sensitivity of the asset. As each layer contain its own specific key and authorization protocol to access, the act of penetrating one layer will trigger the alarm and notify your business about the attacker threats.
5. Adopt private cloud and/or secure the transition within the public cloud
Going with public, private, or hybrid cloud services will depend on your business’ purpose. A private cloud service offers you a customizable virtual place, which means you can build the exact IT specification based on your team’s expectations. Furthermore, you have more control and protection toward your resources and data access. In contrast, if you choose to go with a private Cloud, there are some shortfalls subjective to cyberattacks as your vendor might grant physical site access to other tenants, or access can be granted from anywhere. Having said that, the public Cloud is still an excellent choice for most companies, and more and more workloads are publicized on the public cloud platforms. If the latter choice is your final decision, there are 4 ways to enhance the transition security within the public clouds that you might consider:
- Developing a cloud-centric cybersecurity model in which businesses must come to an agreement on how to manage perimeter in the Cloud and how much you should re-architect applications.
- Re-designing the full set of cybersecurity controls for the public cloud.
- Be clear and specific about internal responsibilities for cybersecurity.
- Applying DevOps to cybersecurity to create highly automated security service available to the developers via APIs.
6. Perform security assessments within the workplace frequently
Security assessments are the examination to analyze the current state of an organization’s cyber security performance. It includes building and enhancing the employee’s awareness and practices of cybersecurity policy and testing the security control compliance with the industry-accepted standards.
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