Following the events of 2020, retaining the customer trust has never been this important and at the same time so difficult. With the wide range of changes in the working patterns like mass mitigation to remote working has made the task of keeping the job secure difficult. Juggling between the sophisticated cyber criminals and the Government’s pressure to ensure its compliance, the previous year had become a minefield. Amidst these Cyber security rose to the top of the most organization’s plan for the coming year of 2021.
Summing up all the challenges faced by the wide variety of organizations, Edwin Weijdema, Global Technologist, and Product Strategy at Veeam produced few main things to consider while setting up cyber security.
We might think that the business have been accelerating in their digital transformations and possibly there cannot be any loop holes, but what we don’t know is that, even the cyber criminals are also having it hard. There has been a sharp rise in ‘Dark Clouds’ as cybercriminals have drifted to the cloud, habitually for the same reasons businesses have and the cloud allows them to avoid big up-front capital expenses or pay monthly for their shady businesses and scale up only when they need to. The cyber criminals are innovative more than ever now. It ranges from the cloud based cashes filled with stolen user data such as email addresses and authentication credentials, to personal identifiable information (PII) such as scans of passports, driver’s licenses and bank invoices. Data exfiltration is now the backbone of all cyber-attacks. One breach is all it takes to ruin the reputation and the relationship with the customers. Therefore having an effective cyber security program in place puts the business continuity at minimum to no risk.
The risk factor for every business is fast-tracking between the collaborating cybercriminals, the upwards trajectory of data growth and the distributed workforce. The general IT spending is increased by around 5-10% in the New Year in most of the businesses, despite the economic impact of the pandemic. And we expect most of that allocation to go towards IT security. In spite of having these investments, it is not enough to cover the entire potential threat vectors and the businesses are being forced to place their strategic bets across their people, processes and technology in the hope of make their weak points strong. It’s impossible for every business to get this mix perfectly right and the business leaders also need to strategize how best to avoid these cyber-attacks. Making sure every member of the company plays in the cyber security challenge is key instead of just constantly asking the IT professionals to handle who will already be putting out fires. The entire ecosystem of peer organizations, experts, suppliers, vendors and even the government should be aligned and geared towards contesting this threat.
Meanwhile as the Cyber criminals also work together by sharing information about critical vulnerabilities, breached systems and targets extremely fast, it would be good to work with the local law enforcement agency like NESA, The National Electronic Security Authority in the UAE, to figure out how to best utilize risk management models. Technology is always going to be the heart of your cyber security fight, but no one product is going to maximize your cyber security state. Organizations need to look for software-defined models integrated with external services a hybrid security approach. This includes cloud-based software such as PenTesting-as-a-Service (PtaaS), Scanning-as-a-Service (ScaaS), Network Defense-as-a-Service (NDaaS), Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) and Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS). Build an ecosystem that will stand by your side when the cyber security battle starts to heat up.
