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Month: March 2022

IT Security Policy: Role in Preventing Cyber Threat

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In order to ensure safe and secure computing, storage and processing of data, organizations require a well-designed IT security policy. Several IT risks such as unauthorized access, data loss, credential abuse, data breach attempts, alteration of an organization’s information assets can be addressed through a good IT security policy.

By having a well-defined IT security policy in place, organizations can ensure that every employee follows the security framework. A comprehensive and stringent IT security policy should cover a wide range of topics, including the structure of workstations and how (and when) the employees should log in. It establishes safe IT practices. 

On the other hand, an organization’s information assets, including any intellectual property, are vulnerable to compromise if information security mechanisms are not in place. There could be various reasons behind the lack of an IT security policy, including lack of resources to assist with policy development, poor management adoption, or lack of knowledge about the necessity of an efficient IT security program in place.

 

Why is it required?

When designing business information security rules, it’s critical to remember the principles of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The major purpose of an IT security policy is to create the discipline of reliable IT security practices. IT security policies are intended to address security risks, execute measures to mitigate IT security vulnerabilities and specify how to recover from any cyber disaster.

As a result of the policies, employees are also advised on what they should and shouldn’t do. Having comprehensive security measures has several advantages for the organization. Policies can aid in the improvement of a company’s overall security posture. There are minimal access security cases involving the organization, and employees may turn to the policies to handle them. 

Creating a robust IT security policy also helps to prepare audit reports, that ensures  compliance with regulatory standards. Additionally, it enhances user and stakeholder accountability inside an organization, important to maintain checks and balances. 

 

How does IT Security Policy help?

A standard and detailed IT security policy is a part of an organization’s entire governance program. It provides security technologies and processes the legitimacy and clear accountability, ownership, and transparency for auditing reasons.

For the following reasons, an information security policy is required:

  • Data integrity: A well-defined policy allows organizations for a systematic approach to detect and reduce risks to data confidentiality, integrity, availability, and proper response measures in an incident.
  • Reduction of IT Risk: An information security policy outlines how a company detects, analyses, and mitigates IT vulnerabilities to prevent security risks & the procedures for recovering from a system outage or data breach.
  • Implement and monitor security policies across every department: A unified information security policy avoids departmental decisions that aren’t aligned to the business objectives, and those departments that don’t have any policies at all. It outlines how the company determines which technologies or processes aren’t performing useful security functions.
  • Third parties and external auditors should be aware of the policy: A standard IT security policy helps organizations to explain the procedures to external auditors, contractors, third parties, business partners and of course employees and internal stakeholders.
  • To aid regulatory compliance: An organization must have a well-developed and well-defined security policy to comply with the global regulations and standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, ISO 27001, SOX etc. Auditors frequently seek records of end-user activities, and the information security policy can assist to demonstrate who has performed which task and for what reason:
    • Examine the effectiveness of the policy in the current IT security context
    • Perform a risk assessment to identify and mitigate IT security loopholes
    • Examine the efficacy of the systems involved with overall access management

 

Conclusion

IT security policies play a vital role in any company’s success. The objective of security policies is not to fill up the gaps, but to ensure that no gaps are created. If security policies are not constantly updated, they might not be able to withstand the emerging threats. IT Security policies should be reviewed and revised annually and revised as and when required.

ARCON | Security Compliance Management deployed by a large bank

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The Evolution of IT as a Service

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Background

The inception of outsourcing started way back in the 1980’s and gradually accelerated in the 1990’s. If we dig up the history of hiring services, many organizations did not take it as a convenient facilitator of business convenience. However, in the passage of time, when the load of operational responsibilities and customer services shot up, the necessity of a ‘helping hand’ apart from in-house employees appeared prominently. It not just minimized the workload but also ensured zero interruption in the business continuity.

Due to the increasing demands in every industry, IT services started to get hired by organizations. Initially, what was just ‘IT services’, gradually it turned out to be ‘IT security services’, in the passage of time. Later on, the pattern of services got streamlined into basic cybersecurity mechanisms that got restricted to firewalls and antivirus. But what happens when organizations simply get into the habit of thrusting every work on the outsourced team?

The Nascent Stage

Lack of resources or unavailability of adequate resources necessitated the recruitment of IT staff. There was a time when the meaning of cybersecurity was installing anti-virus software and having firewalls. The organized cyber criminal groups pushed organizations to go a step ahead and developed a Security Operations Center (SOC). This is nothing but a dedicated platform and team that works round the clock to identify, assess, and prevent any cyberattack. However, organizations used to think that SOC is required only in datacenters that were the prime targets of all major IT security threats. 

Further Development

An organization’s entire IT security infrastructure goes for a toss once the entire security is dependent on the hired/ outsourced team. The dilemma of ‘to-be-or-not-to-be’ forced many organizations to do an unusual delay over building up the IT security ecosystem in their organization. Even if SOC was hired, there was no apt and knowledgeable person who could monitor, manage and keep a regular eye on the ‘W’ factors: 

  • What is happening? 
  • Who is monitoring?
  • What is being accessed?
  • Why is it being accessed?
  • How is it accessed?
  • Who is accessing?

Gradually a million-dollar question popped in the mind of the organizations: Why shouldn’t there be a person equally alert, aware and knowledgeable to assess whether the IT infrastructure of the organization is actually secure? This gave the birth of a CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) and a CTO (Chief Technology Officer). As the pattern of cyber threats turned sophisticated, the required knowledge to prevent threats and protect data assets became highly imperative. Especially, it is not possible for organizations to prevent zero-day threats if there are no reliable and dedicated insiders to manage, control and monitor zero day threats. This initiated the idea of an in-house IT security team (headed by CISO/ CTO/ CIO) even if there is a separate outsourced team. 

Current Scenario

Truly speaking, the evolution of outsourced cyber security is the fastest one the world has ever seen. Many organizations lack the capacity to ensure robust security in the vast and distributed environment. Due to adoption of advanced technologies, the threat patterns are also changing drastically. Many times, organizations lack the role of the key IT security persons who can do continuous R&D to initiate new strategies to stop anomalous activities in the enterprise network periphery. So, they count on service providers to get the job done.

Moreover, if the organization has multiple privileged environments, then IT security is highly imperative, else non-compliance charges might get applied. Privileged accounts are the gateways to confidential business information and thus there is no alternative to secure the environment. But are the organizations completely safe once they outsource IT security team? What are the advantages and disadvantages of hiring an IT security service provider?

 

Advantages Disadvantages
There are conveniences of outsourcing IT security – the organization need not bother about whom to allocate which task and who would monitor them. There are no in-house responsibilities like continuous monitoring of privileged tasks, IT risk assessment, audit and more Organizations are forced to share their confidential business information with the third party bodies, as they work closely with the dedicated ‘in-house’ IT team. It is too difficult to restrict sharing of business information
Outsourcing offers no requirement of internal resources. It minimizes multiple tasks like recruitment, scrutiny, allocating tasks and above all, keeping a continuous vigil on the activities. There are risks of malicious actors among the outsourced team. These actors not just malign reputation, but also pushes their recruiters (outsourced organization) towards business loss and business uncertainty.
Cost effectiveness is another part which ends just by signing the contract and asking the third-party team to ensure what to do and what not to do. It has been observed on multiple occasions that the cost of a dedicated internal IT security is more compared to that of an outsourcing team. It is good to have advanced third-party tools to ensure end-to-end security in the client’s IT environment. However, too much dependence on the third-party tools might not allow the organizations to grow quality IT security and IT risk management teams. This might hinder enterprise growth and prosperity.
In the case of a privileged environment, the requirement is more intense and simultaneously the risk is also higher. The outsourced team offering a robust Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution becomes responsible for password management, user authentication, and real-time monitoring, audit and compliance.  While outsourcing, it is hardly possible for organizations to maintain confidentiality of business information because unless there is adequate sharing of information, the desired expectation of work might not take place.

Conclusion

Cyber-attacks, insider threats and third-party threats to confidential data remain one of the topmost concerns for IT security and risk management teams. In the last couple of years, adoption of hybrid models has necessitated more and more usage of outsourced IT security service/ solution providers. Managing on-prem IT security and remote security at the same time is a common challenge for organizations. Outsourcing the relevant IT security service provider can surely overcome the challenge provided the risk factors, as mentioned above, are taken care of. 

Data Breaches: Reasons & Remedies

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In the next couple of years, organizations have one in four chances of data breach that could cost around $2.21 million. An apparently small IT security vulnerability might result in a significant data breach incident if not addressed on time.

Large, small and mid-size enterprises may face serious consequences if sensitive information is made public. Apart from the financial consequences and legal wrangles due to noncompliance with regulations, business operations might be crippled due to breaches. The first step in preventing a data leak is to understand the root cause. There are several causes of data breach incidents. A few among them are discussed here:

 

5 common causes of data breaches:

It is not always that data breaches stem from organized cyber criminal groups.

  • Unpatched Security Vulnerabilities 

If IT security patches are not updated or addressed for extended periods, it might open the door for hackers to get easy access to your company’s confidential data assets. Not only that, it might stay unnoticed for a longer period and the extent of damage could be on the higher side.

  • Manual Error 

This is one of the common reasons for data theft in an organization. The nature of the error may vary, but some of them are: creating weak and predictable passwords, sending sensitive information to the wrong people, sharing password/ account information in an open excel sheet, falling for phishing and more. Most of these human errors can be prevented by ensuring that employees are well-versed in basic data security protocols along with stringent IT security policies.

  • Malware 

Malware may not be a huge concern for employees’ PCs but can be a growing threat aimed directly at the infrastructure of your company. While many of these “malware incidents” are insignificant, the sheer volume can be concerning.

The primary reason would be that the hackers can make slight changes to existing malware programs to render them unidentifiable to antivirus software while still achieving the hacker’s desired impact. 

  • Insider Threats 

Insiders are one of the biggest reasons behind data breaches in organizations. If the authorized user in the IT infrastructure misuses the elevated entitlements then the enterprise data could be accessed with malicious intent. The most dangerous fact of a malicious insider is that it remains unnoticed and undetected for long as the ‘trust’ is misused.

  • Physical Theft 

Theft of any official device such as pen drive, external hard drive or even laptop with critical information about the organization is the last item on our list, though it is not the least harmful. The data saved on the devices are misused after being stolen.

How to Prevent a Data Breach?

As discussed, data breach incidents can happen due to multiple reasons; similarly, there are multiple areas of IT security that can ensure prevention of data thefts. While ensuring timely patching helps to address system vulnerabilities, for today’s organizations it is also critical to have unified endpoint management platforms, which includes, Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and end-users behavior analytics measures along with robust Identity and Access Management practices. Robust (IAM) practices enforce Identity Governance and help to manage the life-cycle of identities, whether interacting with cloud resources or legacy applications. 

In addition, every end-user in an IT ecosystem should have active involvement in protecting critical data. Apart from following the IT security policies, every end-user activity needs to be monitored seamlessly at a granular level. The simple reason is every user in the IT environment could be a potential threat.

Lastly, privileged environments are the most vulnerable environments in terms of data breaches. Privileged accounts are the gateways to most of the confidential business information, and thus it is targeted by malicious third-parties, organized hacker groups and even corporate insiders. A robust and comprehensive Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution addresses the risks of unmonitored and unauthorized access to the target systems. It ensures that trusted entitlements are never compromised by enforcing authorization, authentication and audits for every privileged session. 

Conclusion

In the current IT context, where IT resources are scattered across hybrid environments and end-users access systems from anywhere, it is critical to ensure robust security policies and procedures. Organizations can significantly bring down the chances of data breach incidents if IT vulnerabilities are addressed on time by adopting endpoint protection and Identity and Access Management solutions.

How Privileged Access Management Ensures IT Agility

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Overview

 

“Agility is the ability to adapt and respond to change… agile organizations view change as an opportunity, not threat.”

 -Jim Highsmith, software engineer and author of ‘Adaptive Software Development’

 

The flexibility, control and responsiveness of IT operations determine how agile an organization is. IT agility is about optimizing the flow of creating value for the customer services with the available resources in zero interference. In the age of massive IT automation, organizations always face the challenge of managing thousands of end-users and their activities that ensure uninterrupted IT processes. Each and every whereabouts of the tasks and responsibilities demand intense and real-time monitoring so that IT agility is ensured. At the same time, if necessary demands and key approvals are made amid robust IT security, then the organization can be said to be ‘agile’.

 

How can IT Agility take a hit?

 

In the era of digitalization, organizations prioritize IT security policies and ensure how strictly they are followed by the end-users. The seriousness of the situation intensified during the pandemic and even in the post-pandemic time. In the last couple of years, many organizations suffered unusual, unexpected and IT operational setbacks, and thus, IT agility got a hit. With most of the critical accesses happening remotely, timely permissions and necessary denials play a crucial role to ensure security and flexibility among the organizations’ workforce.

Today hybrid work models are adopted by global organizations to stay afloat with the demanding trends. The flexibility of the entire workforce who prioritize, control and monitor the elevated and privileged activities builds up the foundation of IT agility. Excessive delay in the IT administrative tasks affects organizations in terms of smooth IT processes even if the IT security infrastructure is robust enough. It could even affect the service quality followed by slow access and unwanted delay in services.

To be precise, IT efficiency is directly proportional to IT security in any vast IT ecosystem. And if organizations are efficient enough to manage every day-to-day task with zero intervention, then we can say that the organization is agile enough to withstand cyber threats.

What about IT agility in Privileged environment?

 

In case of the privileged environment in an organization, IT agility ensures that all the privileged activities are happening smoothly with no hindrance. As privileged identities are the gateways to confidential business information, any organization would definitely ensure end-to-end security for all privileged activities. However, at the same time, what about the efficiency of the IT processes? Can we consider an organization agile if the approvals for elevated rights take a long time, privileged sessions are delayed due to too many privileged users, or even managing requests from one desk to the other manually? 

 

Let’s see how ARCON’s Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution ensures IT agility of an organization.

 

Role of ARCON | Privileged Access Management (PAM)

 

ARCON | Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution, in this backdrop, not just ensures secured access in the enterprise network, but also helps IT administrators to accomplish their tasks efficiently and on time. The flexibility of the overall business process and reliability of the stakeholders determine the extent of IT agility the organization is having. Here are some robust features of PAM solution that can help organizations to maintain agility simultaneously with protecting confidential business data assets.

Single Sign-On: In a vast IT environment, where there are multiple system administrators, maintaining efficiency is a real challenge because multiple system admins mean multiple user IDs, multiple access credentials and multiple approval procedures. Single Sign-On helps admins to overcome the challenge of managing multiple accounts by automating the access rights without the necessity to remember multiple user IDs and passwords.

User OnBoarding: It is always necessary for the IT administrators to ensure ease of offering permissions while adding new user accounts and servers groups with associated privileges. It helps administrators to provision or deprovision users by interacting with the active directory. With PAM, organizations can ensure all information on boarded stays confidential and secure.

Auto-Discovery: Identifying and tracking ownership of privileges is a real challenge for the IT Security team. With this, the IT risk management team records the details of all shared accounts and service accounts and thereby mitigates the risk of unrecorded access.

One Admin Control: In a vast IT environment, every access to the critical systems needs to happen through one admin console. All these rule and role-based access in the IT environment happens only on a ‘need-to-know’ and ‘need-to-do’ basis.  

Workflow Management: Enterprise IT agility is ensured if the administration job is prompt and hasslefree. This PAM feature automates the approval process of privileged users, user groups and service groups. In case of manual approvals, it remains time-consuming and tedious, hence Workflow Management enhances efficiency. 

AD Bridging: Different operating systems in a single network periphery could be highly challenging for the IT administrators. ARCON’s PAM solution allows organizations to use Microsoft Active Directory as the authoritative source of identity. It accepts both privileged and non-privileged accounts from non-Windows machines (eg. Linux, Unix).

Desk Insight: Attending requests from one desk to another is a real challenge for IT administrators in a vast IT environment. In order to make it efficient, this feature helps them to manage requests from one desk to another by troubleshooting a machine without moving. It even helps to allow admin rights, define a set of tasks, manage passwords etc. 

Robotic Process Automation: Who likes to do regular mundane IT tasks? The Robotic Process Automation (RPA) automates these tasks with ease, efficiency and accuracy. It also offers to customize steps for the end-users for any SSO activity. 

 

Conclusion

Once organizations ensure both the security and efficiency in the IT environment, IT agility is restored with zero intervention. It maintains flexibility and offers a different edge to the responsiveness of the organization. Above all, it helps to meet the requirements of the compliance standards and thereby maintains business continuity.

Importance of Data Security & Data Privacy

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Information is the key, and it turns out to be the most valuable asset of any organization, including transaction details, knowledge sharing, communications with clients, virtual databases & IT infrastructure. Irrespective of any legal or regulatory restrictions, safeguarding your company’s data should be at the top of the priority list. Data security has always been a priority for every enterprise. By protecting it, organizations can prevent financial loss, consumer dissatisfaction, reputational harm, and disruption in business continuity.

Furthermore, government rules and regulatory mandates of data-security make it highly imperative for a company to ensure data security measures everywhere in the IT environment. It is more necessary in a shared and distributed environment where the critical information is shared among multiple stakeholders. Data security measures helps to protect business information from unauthorized access and malicious third-parties.

 

Data Privacy vs Data Security

Confidential business data and its security should not be treated lightly by enterprises that are accumulated or transferred every day. In order to safeguard fundamentally sensitive information such as digital identities, finances, business contracts, strategic blueprints and even medical records.

Cyber criminals and other malefactors look for loopholes to access volumes of potentially valuable data (in terms of money). However, not everyone is aware of or can comprehend the distinction between data privacy and security. As a result, the terms are frequently misunderstood or used interchangeably.

The distinction between privacy and security boils down to whose data is protected, how it is protected, from whom it is protected, and who is responsible for it. However, the primary difference between security & privacy is that security is inclined towards safeguarding data from malicious threats, whereas privacy is concerned with data usage – who is accessing what and why? 

Data security is meant to protect sensitive information. Data privacy deals with who is accessing which data that could be protected from cyber threats. Regardless of who the unauthorized person is, data security is primarily concerned with preventing unwanted access, mostly with malicious intent. Organizations can ensure this by deploying IT security tools and advanced technologies. IT security policies also play a big role to prevent sensitive business information from data breaches.

 

The Importance of data privacy and data security in current scenario

Financial data, enterprise data, healthcare information & other personal consumer or user data can become deadly if they get into the wrong hands. Due to some lack of secured access control mechanisms, enterprises might be subject to fraud and identity theft.

Furthermore, a data breach may jeopardize the security of the entire business set up. And once it happens, it exposes the confidential information to a competitor or in the gray market. Data protection regulations come into play in this situation. Safeguards against data loss or corruption are also included in this approach. SMEs and MNCs are also included in this approach. Every organization might face alarming consequences if they don’t have adequate information security processes in place.

 

Conclusion 

As our computing dependence rises, there are a lot of potential threats to our data. We can lose data due to a system failure, computer error, or a hacker’s manipulation. Private data and its security should not be treated lightly by enterprises as it is the core of any business. ARCON provides modern, advanced and industry-specific information security solutions that ensure business scalability, continuity and compliance.

IAM & PAM: Are they the Same?

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Overview

Very often the two IT security practices, Privileged Access Management (PAM) and Identity and Access Management (IAM) are misunderstood or mistaken to be the same. Both these access management security solutions are commonly used in large organizations and SMEs to manage authorization, authentication and seamless monitoring of the users on a large scale. However, if we perform a hair-split analysis, both the solutions serve a slightly different purpose in the enterprise IT environment. 

What is IAM?

Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution manages and controls the general end-users’ run-time access to the IT resources such as applications, network files etc. The purpose of the IAM solution is to enhance the IT operational effectiveness along with governing and managing the life-cycle of a large number of internal and external identities.

What is PAM?

Privileged Access Management (PAM) is a subset of IAM that controls and manages the privileged users’ access to the critical IT resources of an enterprise. It’s a secured method of allowing access to a set of end-users called as privileged users- the super users with elevated privileges or  administrative rights to access highly sensitive and confidential data, network devices among other critical IT assets whether hosted on-premise or on-cloud.

What are the Commonalities between IAM & PAM?

Role-based Access: Both IAM and PAM controls user access based on user roles and revokes the access rights once the task is over. It is not necessary that every user requires access to every application. Hence, role-based access is the first step towards a robust security goal where predefined sets of permissions are set to accomplish specific tasks.

Multi-factor Authentication: It adds an additional layer of security that is beyond just an access credential consisting of username and password. IAM authenticates predefined system-based users with OTP-based authentication, biometrics, sometimes Password-less mechanisms such as QR codes, while PAM offers robustness in access controls with adaptive authentication mechanism. It uses unique verifying parameters such as geo-location, IP address, biometric data or even typing speed of the privileged user to ensure that the user is genuine.

Seamless Monitoring: Continuous monitoring of the end-user activities is an essential security component of IAM, so as for PAM. It helps organizations to ensure that the suspicious activities are identified and notified immediately after detection, so that the IT security team can take prompt action.

Reporting: As per the demands of the regulatory standards, comprehensive audit reports of every end-user activities is mandatory in any organization. IAM helps organizations with a detailed analytic report of every user activity to the target systems. PAM customizes the report with detailed analytics of every privileged access to the target systems/ applications. It helps IT managers in improving user decision making and enables auditors to assess regulatory compliance status of the organization.

How are they Different?

IAM and PAM have some major differences too. Here are some.

Feature IAM PAM
Users & IT Assets After deployment, IAM helps organizations to control and manage both users and IT assets simultaneously PAM on the other hand helps IT administrators with secured access over the IT assets in granular level and prevents any unauthorized users from misusing information assets
Reliability & Flexibility The demand of IAM is more due to flexibility of deployment with any existing platform of the organization; though IAM’s flexibility can be misused easily opening up to security risks PAM is comparatively less adaptable than IAM – it bridges the gap between flexibility and security and applies stringent access control policies for business-critical assets
Provisioning & Deprovisioning IAM helps in provisioning and deprovisioning of all end users to access applications PAM on the other hand allows only privileged users to access critical systems and applications only after verifying the authenticity of the users

Conclusion

IAM helps enterprises to map which end-user can access which resources/ applications in the IT ecosystem. PAM, in this scenario, defines who has access permission or administrative access to IT resources. While addressing the IT security demands, enterprises ensure the access control management is successfully restored with centralized access management policy in place. With both IAM & PAM working together, it is convenient for any organization to manage overall access control policy in a secured manner.