If you read it on the internet, then you must think it’s true? Well, we know that it is not always the case. I recently saw a joke / meme that posed the following question:

Who led the digital transformation for your business?

a.   CIO

b.   CTO

c.    COVID-19

As humorous as it may seem on the surface, it points to an interesting dilemma. Over the past few months, businesses have been forced to change, remain relevant, continue functioning, reach new audiences and …. stay viable.

The rapid rate of change has certainly been impressive, and it’s inspiring to see companies be able to re-invent themselves and new businesses emerge. New business models have been implemented within weeks, days, hours…. but at what cost to security? One factor is the ability to scale. As the demand for online services increased, use of cloud and cloud-native applications proved their relevance.

When we consider cloud native applications where security has been fully ‘baked in’, we can be assured that the security will also scale to protect both business and consumer alike. However, what happens to the rapid changes that transpired to serve everything else? It forced some businesses to ‘turn themselves inside out’ in order to survive. Internal operations and processes that used to be done inside the ‘safe walls of business’ all of a sudden had to be exposed to the internet.As business moves ‘out of the office’, at IBM Security we coined a phrase ‘the trusted insider is now outside’.

There are a number of considerations that business should deliberate in order to ensure their ongoing operations are secure given their growing and changed attack surface:

1.    Visibility: You cannot protect what you cannot see, ensure that you have visibility over your core assets including people, applications, data, servers, laptops

2.    Monitor the crown jewels: Know what is most critical to your business- customer information, manufacturing / plant operations, intellectual property, and ensure that you have sufficient telemetry to monitor its availability, integrity and confidentiality

3.    Access Management: Take a careful look at your privileged access management (PAM) and ensure that this is able to operate in the new ‘inside out’ world. Also consider how you are using VPNs and 3rd party identity providers for balancing how you let both recognised. This includes the previously unknown entities connect back into your business environment.

4.    Channel Management: With the move out of the office, closely look at new platforms you are using for video conferencing, email, cloud storage among others. Take careful note of where personal emails and unofficial cloud storage mechanisms are now being used for corporate data exchange.

5.    Manage Operations via Intelligence: Ensure that you have threat intelligence data (Example: Such as that provided by IBM X-Force), and use capabilities such as threat filtered DNS provided by Quad9 to bolster your defences and provide a safer environment for workers

6.    Plan and Prepare: There has never been a better time to put your incident response and crisis management plan to the test. As a business, stay agile and delve at how well prepared you and your staff are to manage an incident or crisis in this new way of working? How well are your service providers and suppliers able to respond in order to ensure your continued supply chain?

To hear more about how to address these key areas and prepare your business for dealing with the rapidly growing attack surface, join the webcast https://ibm.co/3cKEKIS