5 Key Factors To ‘Avoid’ Information Security Risks

Now, the intense race is on between development and security. Thanks to the rapid technological advancements and changing trends that made this happen. Moreover, the COVID-19 crisis has added more to the IT brainstorming across organizations, globally.

Increasing cloud adoption has become imperative than ever, and eventually, information security is drawing more attention.

Naturally, Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) are in the front line of this discussion.

Considering the current scenario, CIOs are thinking about ways to optimize costs in the process of service delivery.

CISOs are keen about upgrading organizational security posture, considering the emerging threat concerns and expanding cloud adoption, among other ways.

Gartner predicts an 8 percent decline in worldwide IT spending this year. In the process, CIOs are reportedly placing aside the cybersecurity projects that cannot deliver the desired ROI.

In contrast, the rate of security attacks has increased this year, including a whopping 667 percent rise in spear-phishing attacks related to COVID-19 alone since February 2020.

At this juncture, both CIOs and CISOs need to remain alert on every security-related move.

Here are five factors that every CISO need to observe to avoid potential risks to cybersecurity infrastructure and resilience:

1. Accountability in Existing Processes

In the wake of work-from-home policy adoption due to the COVID-19 crisis, almost every organization has prepared itself to secure remote access to its systems and networks. In the process, some could successfully address the challenges linked to privileged access credentials.

41 percent of USA businesses feel that outsourced IT or third-party service providers might not have privileged access as a security concern. Moreover, there are also concerns about password vault that ensures password rotation relying on shared passwords. Thus, it doesn’t ensure any accountability on password management. An identity-based approach can be a solution to this accountability issue, where privileged users get authenticated through identity infrastructure.

The point to be noted here is that there is a need to enable systems to safeguard themselves across any network or configuration.

2. Inability to Update to Security Trends

Every organization is gearing up and seriously preparing for digital transformation! But how many can face the emerging cybersecurity challenges? This is where most organizations are stuck today by not updating their systems to the changing threatscape.

Thus, they are indirectly offering due scope to threat actors to penetrate through legacy systems. Though the frontline security administrators or analysts report the same, security leaders often tend to pay less attention to the same. Thus, organizational cybersecurity suffers!

3. Conflict of Interest

This is the most common challenge that IT security teams face in most organizations. CISOs know the situation on the ground and thus list the processes and tools required to address the given challenges. But the approvals lie with the CIO and the executives above.

Given the declining IT budgets, many CISOs are finding it hard to get the security budgets approved. Moreover, as surveys report, many CIOs are thinking of cutting down cybersecurity projects incapable of delivering the desired ROI. So, it’s time for CISOs to find ways to get the security budgets for organizational safety. This is a matter of conflict of interest.

4. Over-reliance on Cloud IAM Tools

Cloud service providers provide along basic-level IAM support to secure cloud workloads. But that might not be sufficient to secure multi-cloud and hybrid environments.

IAM offerings by leading cloud platforms can help you keep the business running but may not able to scale up to the emerging challenges. Thus, the IT security teams should think of advanced solutions to address complex areas of Identity Access Management and Privileged Access Management (PAM) arising out of IT expansion.

5. Identity-Centric Security Approach

Just like the way they focused on infrastructure up-gradation, organizations should also think about modernizing secure access. Experts recommend the identity-centric approach as an alternative to legacy password management. Moreover, the advanced solutions follow zero-trust principles and enforce least privilege approach and just-in-time access to avoid risks. Thus, organizations should prefer an identity-centric approach rather than a vault-centric one for Privileged Access Management (PAM).

In Conclusion

It’s time to keep aside the conflict of interest and take the holistic approach and work together for organizational information security. Gear up to implement the best practices and be abreast of the emerging cybersecurity challenges.