Worried by the growing cases of security breaches, with resultant data and systems compromises, Enterprise security expert, ITANDT with its partners, IBM have, among others, proffered five key ways to secure enterprises.
According to them breaches can be avoided if you know what to do, even though the cyber-security attack surface continues to expand with vanishing network perimeters, and cyber attackers evolving from pranksters into organized criminals.
According to them you should not:
- Rely too much on compliance alone, because compliance and security are two different things, and just doing the minimum-what regulators demand-is not enough, as regulators come and go but the criminals remain. Arguing that not all data of value is regulated data, compliance must be a continuous process, and act as a catalyst for improved data security overall.
- Data security must be holistic and integrated with cloud, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud and enterprise-wide, on premises IT platforms, while protection must be extended beyond DLP, SIEM and network security, to prioritizing and addressing exposed critical data.
- Enterprises must avoid diffusion of responsibilities across IT, DBAs, security compliance, LOB as this could lead to lack of accountability enterprise-wide; every data set needs owners as well as curators, just as your organization may need a data protection officer.
- Patch vulnerabilities and make sure you keep track of all assets and data sources that need patching, including production and test environments that contain sensitive data, and scan to assess vulnerabilities frequently, automatically, and look for results that are prioritised by urgency and that
- Monitoring everything create a data deluge, but find automated classification, vulnerability assessments, and file and databases activity monitoring tools with ; what-if’ analytics to uncover your key risks and unusual behaviours.
Officials of the three companies who spoke at a workshop today, in Lagos, painted a grim picture of growing activities of cyber criminals, especially in the mobile ecosystem.. Khalid Shaban, IBM Technical Specialist said mobile malware is growing and that at any given time malicious code is infecting mobile devices, as 97 and 87 per cent of top paid android and IOS apps have been hacked.
Today’s threats are real, and no one is immune, Shaban says, adding that malware threats are no longer the most prevalent but the scourge of phishing links, as in every 20 seconds, a new phishing site is registered, as over 45 per cent of organisations have had devices encounter crypto jacking attacks.
Ibrahim Kyuka, who represented Rakiya Mohammed, Chief Information Security Officer of CBN, said most mobile IT landscape risks arise from poor governance, data loss, weak infrastructure, impersonation and loss or stole devices.
According to Shaban nearly one-third of enterprises will experience at least one data breach over the next two years, as criminals are getting more sophisticated with users bombarded with more apps and data that they can handle. Data, he said has become a currency and costs are going through the roof and pressure is on leadership to find the right solution to keep up with it all.
Focusing on regulatory compliance, ensuring workloads in the cloud meet new security standards, adopting standard security frameworks and controls and designing integrated risk, compliance and security analytics are some sure way to solving the challenge, says Roland Martey also of IBM.
Organisations, he said, are using too many tools from too many vendors, while there are too little cyber security experts to handle challenges, and disconnected security capabilities are feeling enterprises.
Marten says IBM has the needed security immune system to mitigate cyber insecurity by deploying cloud security and collaboration and by deploying security information and event management, identity and access management and mobile threat detection, enterprise mobility management and client management tools into one single, secure and smart platform.
IBM, to demonstrate its readiness to help organisations to secure their enterprises showcased its IBM security solutions strategy, IBM Maa360, IBM Q-Radar and Guardium Analyser.
Though they were upbeat that their solutions offer the needed help to secure enterprises, they, however, conceded that no application is 100 per cent foolproof, but that one can achieve desired results by prioritizing assets and security, and also by applying effective management control. “It all depends on what is important to you and what you want secure”, says Shaban.
“We can provide you with solutions that you can work with and run your enterprise smoothly, in spite of the (enormity of the challenge)… We have to automate, be in the cloud and even though the volumes are increasing, there are solutions to mitigate them and handle the growing challenges”, Akpos Okoro, chief executive officer of ITANDT, added.
