Cybersecurity: The Knight Rider to Ever Growing

Digital Ecology?
According to a recent survey from ESET, 75 percent of infosec decision-makers
now considers Artificial Intelligence as the silver bullet for their security issues.
While AI being incredibly useful in assisting human analysts, alone it cannot
ensure solid information security strategy and requires an agile cybersecurity
approach to ensure reliable and safe business processes within organization.

The National Cyber Security Strategy UK, has allocated nearly £2 billion to
tackle cyber threats until 2021

Ransomware, Phishing, DDoS like threats can cause an untold amount of

damage to your organization, and a worrying 33% of cyber invasions
succeed which cost businesses $2 trillion per year worldwide. These figures are
only rising, and experts estimate these damages to reach $90 trillion by 2030.

With exponential growth in fields like big data analytics, the Internet of Things
(IoT), blockchain, and mobile computing, big corporates have adapted smart
ways to handle everything from decision making to customer service. With
virtually all business processes being automate and the increasing digital
transformation of the entire value chain create agility, but they also
significantly raise cybersecurity risks and threat levels.
As the IoT is extended to everything from industrial equipment to consumer
devices, Next-generation devices are now working in potentially vulnerable
environments such as vehicles, hospitals, and energy plants, vastly increasing
the risks to human welfare. Concerns about such devices being hacked, turned
into botnets, and used to attack targeted computers and organizations are
growing as well.
When it comes to digitally transforming an enterprise business, cybersecurity
must be the prime focus from the very beginning. As a matter of fact, large
industrial vendors like GE today provides not just the equipment used in
production environments but also subscription-based monitoring and
maintenance services to ensure that equipment does not experience an
unexpected outage.
Cybersecurity strategy shift from reactive to agile.
Organizations are now adapting proactive approach by creating IT
infrastructures—and even entire enterprises— which are agile and adaptive,
where breaches are addressed before they happen.
Currently, companies vary widely in their tolerance of innovative, peer-to-peer
technologies and collaboration tools, resulting in a challenge to attract and
retain ‘millennial’ workers, and innovate at the pace of digital-first companies
disrupting traditional business.
Innovation debt is a critical element of this transition.
Deferred innovations create a ‘debt’ and headache for decision makers when
the time to access those investments comes along and they aren’t there to
support new offerings or compete with market trends.
For now, ‘legacy debts’ around older technologies is arising concerns for the
complex business processes. For example, many companies have modern Web
interfaces that are linked to older mainframes for certain functions and newer,
cloud-based systems for others.
In the event of a breach or the deployment of a new application, engineer’s
broad skill set is essential to maintain functionality of these hybrid systems
that is difficult to source.

Cybersecurity strategy shift from devices to services.

While sophisticated standardization of tools such as firewalls for securing
devices and zones, risk management in the digital age needs a bigger picture,
managed-service approach and tactical investment which can protect entire IT
ecosystems over time.
In today’s digitized ecosystem, cybersecurity and technology landscape has
become complex. The big mainframes of older legacy technologies are in sharp
contrast to the clouds above them – and it’s difficult to decide which systems
to modernize first. Proactive IT strategy blends old and new models of risk
management to make a new value, without abandoning old investments.
Traditional ‘perimeter-based cybersecurity is not enough to carry
organizations into the future’
New digital business products such as Web apps and mobile apps, requires
integration of customer information through an application program interface
(API). However, opening company data up is risky too, and requires a wise
investment in Cybersecurity to ensure balance between risk and reward of new
digital businesses.
Compromised credentials is the holy grail of cyber attacks.
According to Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report, over half — and
trending toward 100% — of recent data breaches were due to compromised
credentials. These credentials are the digital “keys to the kingdom” and give
hackers everything they need to access corporate apps, siphon off sensitive
data and damage or destroy critical systems.
An easy way for attackers is to gain access to shared privileged accounts such
as root, local administrator, or domain admin accounts.
Even implementing privileged account management solutions, end users still
remain vulnerable.
A unified integrated Identity solution is the key to secure enterprise identities
and delivers context-aware access control in the cloud or on-premises to meet
the needs of any IT environment.