Staying ahead in cyber security: Strategies part 2

In part one of this blog series, we discussed some of the platform policies that you can put in place to minimise your risks. 

It is now time to move into the IT depths of the IT administrator’s department and consider the technological advancements that have been made available to monitor what data and systems you manage, and what business needs they support. 

Asset management 

Whether physical or virtual hardware is used across your network, technical debt is a common vulnerability often overlooked by busy IT departments. To reduce technical debt, it is advised that devices are regularly updated and patches are often implemented. A nonchalant attitude or “we can attend to later” thought process is detrimental to your organisation, cyber defence should be treated as a constant and not on an ad-hoc basis. 

Organisations need to ensure that good cyber-security practices are implemented into their systems and services so that they can be maintained and updated to adapt effectively to emerging threats and risks. For an organisation to understand and manage their cyber-risks, all assets should be accounted for. If assets slip under the radar unnoticed or if the appropriate security controls are missing, this becomes an unmanaged risk. 

Good asset management practices can help organisations to identify when their systems will reach end of support or require patches or updates and therefore allows the implementation of a contingency plan. One of the best defences possible is to ensure that systems and devices do not contain known vulnerabilities as these are easy for cyber criminals to attack. Having accurate and up-to-date information on the hardware and software assets within your organisation ensures regular updates can be applied and vulnerabilities will be easier to identify.   

Secure design and configuration  

Beginning any development with strong security practices helps to create systems that are easier to keep secure and will reduce the need for costly rework in the future. A well architected and configured system or service will provide you with confidence that your security controls are constantly mitigating any risks.  

Unfortunately, there isn’t a single measure that works all the time. As such, a risk that has been treated is still a risk, albeit one that is less likely to occur and/or less harmful if it does. Even if your measures are correctly implemented and well-maintained, security can still fail so a dynamic approach, where individual security measures work together effectively and make up for weaknesses, is required. 

In a defence-in-depth approach, multiple, layered defences are needed so that if one layer fails, the others can still prevent the attack from succeeding. Ideally, each layer should present a different and difficult challenge for an attacker. It’s important to design receptive systems where security updates can be applied as soon as they become available, this minimises your exposure to vulnerabilities without adversely affecting the availability of your system. Another way to reduce the risk of attacks, is by protecting external interfaces and removing or disabling configurations and features that aren’t required such as old user accounts, 3rd party software and demonstration capabilities. 

It is important to control and manage changes to your systems and services, the combination of technical and policy controls ensures that all changes are authorised and have undergone appropriate checks to gain confidence that they will not adversely affect live services. The design of these controls will ensure that security updates and fixing vulnerabilities can be a quick process, minimising any risk.  

By protecting your management interfaces, it is harder for an attacker to access critical functions or information. By restricting access to administrative interfaces, including SSH (Secure Shell), RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) and web consoles, only to trusted locations or devices and also ensuring that a multi-factor authentication is enabled for administrative accounts, you'll create barriers of defence from attack. It is also important to ensure that you can still gain access to your systems in an emergency by implementing a ‘break-glass’ procedure in the event of a system or device failure. 

Firewall, Anti-Virus & Anti-Malware  

Your network architecture will contain multiple devices and virtual applications, these will require physical management and frequent monitoring to keep updated.

As mentioned previously, an organisations technical debt will increase if all areas of the network are left unattended for any length of time. 

If an organisation automates their business processes to monitor and self-manage, this can alleviate some of the challenges IT departments face on a regular basis.  However, IT administrators should always maintain access and the responsibility of users at all levels of the business.   

Providing the correct security measures, protecting end users and maintaining a high security level is the balancing act that all IT departments face on regular basis. 

Digital transformation and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)

Most businesses are completing digital transformation initiatives to revolutionise business activities and reinvent their industries. Technology innovations have enabled business processes to become automated and optimised, enabling greater efficiency, quality, and overall productivity. 

This evolution of network and security architectures has created new challenges for businesses that have embraced digital transformation, cloud, and mobile computing trends while struggling to compete in a global market and address greater risk and compliance requirements. 

With hundreds of cyber threats being sent out at a relentless rate, it is not a question of if you get attacked but more likely when. Traditional processes are now falling short and constant innovation is needed to keep up with cyber prevention.  

One new technology called Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), could assist in removing some of the complexity driving multi-vendor, multi-application cyber solutions, by bringing several of the services together at both the network edge and on the core network platforms.  

Discover the technology and functionalities behind SASE and the benefits it can bring to your business in our beginners guide. 

SASE is aimed at reducing the multi-layered cyber threats into a single pass solution that checks all users accessing the network via Zero Trust technology, and once onto the secure private network, all data back and forth is continually screened by the latest Firewall, Anti-Virus, Anti-Malware, and next generation technologies at the cutting edge of Cyber Security.  

With built-in user logging and monitoring, IT administrators can easily access via a single-pane-of-glass manage every user activity on the fly. In the event of a cyber incident, SASE can very quickly identify and deal with any threat as soon as it happens and eliminate the problem or stop the users access and taking them offline. The choice is with the IT department to deal with issues as they occur rather than retrospectively and possibly when the damage has forced it way on to the network and delivered the threat it was designed to do.  

SASE is a new category of cloud-native networking and security solutions, but the technologies and services delivered in a SASE solution are themselves are not new, they have just converged into a unified, cloud-native solution. 

It is now more important than ever to implement a multi-layered and secure cyber strategy due to evolving cyber threats. At CPiO, we understand the importance of keeping your assests safe online, explore our committed IT and cyber security services to discover the comprehensive range of services we offer and how we can help safeguard your business against cyber threats.