Captain James T. Kirk had it easy.
When he wanted to protect his Enterprise, he simply had to tell engineering to raise their shields. Your enterprise, on the other hand, is a little more vulnerable. The bad guys aren’t just in front of you or behind you; they’re everywhere. And the attacks aren’t only coming from the outside, but are happening on the inside too.
What can you do to protect your enterprise? A lot. And that’s exactly what you should be doing. Multilayer security is the best practice for enterprises that run virtualized data centers, store data in the cloud, or use dozens of shadow IT apps—in other words, nearly every enterprise. The goal isn’t to spend every last dollar you have on security, but to make sure that the first dollar you spend is spent on protecting your most important data.
Too often, enterprises make the mistake of trying to protect everything, with the inevitable result that they miss something; a corporate ID gets compromised, an application doesn’t get updated, customer data isn’t properly secured, a remote office gets hacked, and the next thing you know you’re doing damage control in the press. The reality today is that you can’t stop the bad guys from breaking into your business, but you can stop them from walking out with anything valuable.
To do that, you need to identify which data in your enterprise is truly business critical, and how to put countermeasures in to identify a breach and obfuscate the data, hackers may access. Then, do everything you can to protect that business-critical data by wrapping it in multiple protected segments to minimize potential risks.
A multilayer security approach involves more than layers of hardware and software. Enterprises also need layers of policies and processes that support their security strategy. For example, businesses may have software in place to support multifactor authentication, but fail to update their levels of authorization as employees change roles in the company.
And so someone moving from finance to marketing may retain their permission to access financial files, which exposes the company to more risk in the event that the employee’s ID is compromised. You can think of it as good security hygiene or simply damage control, but keeping data permissions up to date can prevent data breaches from becoming costly.
The changing IT landscape has also created new challenges for security.
Cloud computing, mobile devices, and virtualization bring with them unique risks to the business. In the case of the cloud, businesses now have sensitive data stored and transmitted outside the business and in apps beyond the control of IT. What happens to this data when an employee leaves the company? And how do you put a secure firewall around a virtual machine that could be running a different application from day to day?
To find the answers to questions like these, it helps to talk with an expert., like Rolta AdvizeX. We can help you identify and implement the right policies, processes, and products to keep your most important digital assets covered.
For more on how we can protect your enterprise, trek on over to our online Security solutions page. ▪