Achieving a Holistic Approach to Cyber-Security | SoftwareONE Blog

As you may already know, deploying a cloud environment is no small task. You have to find a cloud service provider that is the right fit for your organization, onboard team members, make sure their skill sets are up to par, and more. While it is an exciting and complex journey, there is one aspect that absolutely cannot falter, and that is cloud security.

While many organizations may believe a rules-of-cloud-security can be deployed within their existing security controls, this isn’t the case. Cloud security requires a whole different set of technologies, processes and policies than that of a traditional set up. Let’s take a closer look at four reasons why cloud security is essential to your organization, and what should be in place as you build out your security program.

As security dangers mount, organizations are realizing they need stronger protection against cyber-attacks. Cyber-criminals keep getting savvier at ways to evade security, while internal vulnerabilities keep opening up. But awareness isn’t enough. You have to know how to take action. So, the real question is, what’s the right approach for staying safe?

Despite growing awareness of the enormous threat organizations face from corporate malware attacks, their cyber-security strategies are failing them. As a result, the economic impact of cyber-crime continues to shoot to sky-high levels. In just four years, the losses due to cyber-crime rose from $500 billion to $600 billion worldwide.

If current cyber-security defenses aren’t working, what can your organization do? Increasingly, the experts are recommending organizations to take a holistic approach to cyber-security. What does that mean and what steps can you take to implement such a plan? Read on to find out about the controls you can put into place to protect your business in the new era of threats.

The statistics about economic loss due to cyber-crime is enough to rattle the bones of any CIO, CTO, or CEO. But maybe that’s a good thing if it prompts them to refocus their resources on a new paradigm for cyber-security strategy.

What’s happening is that, while organizations have made great leaps forward in some areas like Digital Transformation, their cyber-security strategies are lagging far behind. What once worked is no longer sufficient to protect increasingly distributed networks from the complex world of threats and vulnerabilities.

That’s partly due to the relentless pace of cyber-crime innovation. By comparison, the pace of corporate cyber-security awareness and adoption seems glacial.

Clearly, a new way of doing things is in order.

The rise of IoT has made managing cybersecurity more complex than ever, negating protective network walls that used to be sufficient.

But even without IoT, less-digitized organizations suffer countless holes in their defense systems with shadow IT, unencrypted IP traffic, and vulnerable SaaS applications.

Here’s what today’s organizations are up against:

Shadow IT

Department-level initiatives like Digital Transformation often bring in new complexities like IoT, new SaaS applications, and even new, unauthorized devices. Since these aren’t always enterprise-wide initiatives, departments may not feel the need to go through proper procurement channels. As a result, responsibility for cyber-security often falls on the heads of department managers without proper knowledge of defenses or compliance standards. They run their own ad-hoc internal IT departments with their own standards of cyber-security, and a whole new level of vulnerability is born. This is known as Shadow IT.

Cyber-security Skills Gap

As companies make headway with their cloud migration goals, many find they are strained in resources to protect these cloud initiatives. Securing the cloud is a complex process that must involve both cloud providers and users, per the taking-a-closer-look-at-the-shared-security-responsibility-model. But what many organizations are finding is that they simply don’t have the in-house skills they need to cover their end of the bargain.

To make matters worse, it is predicted that there will be 3.5 million unfilled jobs for cyber-security professionals by 2021, which means companies are more vulnerable than ever.

The Rise of Crypto Mining Software

“Cryptojacking” is among the newest of threats, as resource-hungry cryptocurrency mining operations become more desperate for processing power. The Cyber Threat Alliance reports a 459 percent increase in cryptojacking rates.

Malware Cocktails

Cyber-criminals are upping their game and creating powerful cocktails that attack companies on several levels. Nowadays, one single attack can mean not just one, but multiple types of malware get introduced into an enterprise ecosystem. They’re stealthy, persistent, and designed to maximize profits for cybercriminals who extort their victims.

If you’re going to protect your data, your devices, and your business processes, it’s going to take more than just building walls around them. Companies have been shifting away from the old “protect the castle” idea of cyber-security and moving toward a holistic approach, able to provide protection from a multitude of threats across various networks, devices, and datasets. One key reason for this is that many security issues come from within the organization - as a result of new ways of dealing with data.

A recent survey revealed that an alarming 72 percent of employees are willing to share sensitive company data with outside organizations. It’s not malicious intent – it’s a product of today’s increasingly collaborative workplace culture, and it calls for a solution that covers data no matter where it’s going.

Answering these various threats and vulnerabilities means stepping up your cyber-security game. To stay ahead of the criminals, you’ll need to:

1. Become aware of your organization’s assets
2. Be proactive about protecting data
3. Adopt a multi-pronged approach to security
4. Arrange for continuous monitoring of assets

However, all of this is tough to do when cyber-professionals are in such high demand.

With skilled and knowledgeable professionals commanding top salaries, it’s becoming increasingly important for organizations to learn about the value of managed security services. With this type of partnership in place, organizations can instantly equip themselves with expert security teams - teams that understand not just security but compliance.

Managed security services address the core cyber-security needs left lacking due to the skills gap, such as securing the cloud. SoftwareONE’s managed-security, for example, offer comprehensive analysis and visibility into threats within the network like malware cocktails and unencrypted IP traffic, as well as into any compliance gaps. Furthermore, by leveragingsoftware-asset-management (SAM) tools, they help close up the vulnerabilities opened by Shadow IT.