In our last post, we took a closer look at Artificial Intelligence and how it can enhance the cybersecurity industry. Today, we are addressing how to support digital innovations without sacrificing security.
What makes a company successful? Ask almost any enterprise today and they will tell you that innovation is a critical piece to ensuring long-term success in the current and evolving business environment. The companies that are able to adapt to the ways in which the market is evolving, compete with newer entrants, and even capitalize on the opportunities and possibilities innovation brings, will be the ones to emerge as successful leaders. Since 2000, a significant number of Fortune 500 companies that are no longer trading, as they couldn’t embrace business change.
Innovation can mean a lot of different things, but for today’s purpose, we will focus on digital innovation of new devices, tools and methods to help businesses streamline their operations and communication engagements with customers. As such, cloud services, IoT implementations and chatbots are some of the top digital innovations that are dominating today’s enterprise ecosystem. Adoption of these technologies is exploding across enterprise cloud services. And while every enterprise would agree these channels are good business investments, there are still challenges of these tools opening their systems and users to massive, widespread and malicious security threats.
At BOHH, we believe that innovation should not come at the expense of security and vice versa. While it may be tricky, there is a way to find balance between the two. Below are several recommendations to support integrating digital innovations in to your business strategy without sacrificing security.
- Consider how these new innovations are handling data before full adoption. Organizations must plan for how the information is stored, how long it’s stored for, how it’s used, and who has access to it on these new channels. This is especially important for highly regulated industries that will deal with sensitive customer information. Perhaps before initiating complete adoption, organizations should consider automating some services using digital innovation tools but still have them working in tandem with human teams to improve the data flow without sacrificing security.
- Research thoroughly the digital innovation tools you plan to integrate if you are using a third party. Many brands are integrating tools such as chatbots and IoT devices that are third-party platforms. While this is a convenient solution, it does mean that the security features are decided by the third party’s own security branch, which means the organization does not have as much control over the security features on the tools they are using to interact with customer data that needs to be protected. If possible, businesses should rely on building their own digital innovation channels from scratch with security built in at the foundation level or working with third party platforms that follow this same rule. Because businesses hold responsibility in keep their data and customers’ data safe, it is important to do a lot of research on the security protocols needed before integrating these tools in to their business strategy.
- All communication on these new tools should be encrypted and deployed only on encrypted channels. This is something that is relatively easy to set up on an organization’s own website and encryption is a great tool to help keep data protected. However, it is important to note that if the data is not encrypted from end-to-end in the transaction process, it leaves an opening for hackers to get access to that data once they have penetrated your system. End-to-end encryption is key to keeping data encrypted throughout the whole data journey, so the data stays better protected from bad actors no matter what channel it is being stored on or accessed through.
Hopefully these tips offer some good balance on adding innovative digital tools to your business strategy without compromising security. Come back next week and we will switch gears a bit and talk about the hot topic of cryptocurrency and how to better protect your investments.
It’s the start of a new year and with that comes new goals and resolutions. As cybersecurity continues to be a top concern for companies, it will most certainly be at the top of most companies’ resolution lists. However, staying ahead of the quickly evolving cybersecurity industry has become increasingly challenging, and it’s hard for companies to stay on top of all the threats and solutions they should have in place. Below are several ways BOHH recommends for companies to start 2018 right and help them better tackle their security resolutions.
Finalize your General Data Protection Regulation Plan:
If this is not in action now or at the top of your list, it is time to get started on this now. Going in to effect later this year in May, companies will need to comply with the GDPR regulations, which applies to all companies that use or process data in the European Union. Since there are a lot of moving parts to ensuring compliance, it is important to take a strategic approach. There are many new changes that companies will be accountable for, so it’s critical to research them properly and have a specific plan for each one. Having your GDPR plan in action and completed by May 2018, will help you avoid fines or penalties imposed on a non-compliant company, as well as stand out as leader in the market committed to security.
Always Implement New Security Patches and Update Old Systems:
Because software systems are constantly evolving, security updates and patches are commonly released to keep up with software improvements. Often, these patches come with instructions to make the updates, and failure integrate these into your system can lead to vulnerabilities and allow hackers to gain access company and customer data. Unfortunately, as we saw in many data breach instances in 2017, many businesses often ignore patches or updates until they encounter issues. When this happens, it leaves the door open for hackers use malware and other type of attacks to exploit these holes and get into your system. Companies that monitor when new patches and updates are out and implement them immediately will face less risk to breaches than those do not and avoid having to undergo an embarrassing explanation on why they are not up-to-date with the recommended security systems.
Create a Zero Trust Model:
There is no longer any trust in security. It’s clear there are no longer any trusted and an untrusted engagements on our security devices, networks or even users. In 2018, companies need to eliminate the idea of a trusted network and start implementing a zero-trust model approach that views all users and network traffic as untrusted that must be verified and enforce strict access control.
There’s No One Size Fits All:
When it comes to security, there is no quick fix or a magical solution that will solve all your security woes. Because there are more tactics to get into a company’s network, it’s hard for companies to rely on just one or two solutions to stay protected. The best way to stay on top of all the threats is by having a combination of solutions like patched systems, constant updates, multi-factor authentication, firewalls, encryption, AI-based tools and more. More than ever, it is important to take the time to make sure you have the right security investments in place and not rely on just one or two.
Hopefully these recommendations will be useful to get your 2018 security strategy started right. Come back next Tuesday when we take a closer look back at the latest news on the Intel chip security flaw and what is the good and bad to take from it.
In our last post, we outlined an IoT scenario to highlight how BOHH’s solution can not only fit in to a real-life business operation workflow, but also improve the security, transport and access of data. Today, we will address an area that often gets overlooked in our era of nonstop attacks and breaches - the ease of implementation when integrating a new cyber security tool into your existing infrastructure network.
As cybersecurity continues to be top of mind for organizations and its executives, most of the conversation has surrounded how to keep information safe from threats and hackers and which cybersecurity solution will be used; while these are important aspects to consider, there is often not as much attention given to how cybersecurity products will actually fit in to a company’s network and infrastructure.
It is important to note that when companies are ready to introduce a new security solution or product in to their network, research and pricing estimates need to be considered on the entire network system, not just the product. Some of the questions that need be researched and answered include:
- Our company has already invested heavily in other solutions, will this make those investments useless?
- Do I need to overhaul my infrastructure to integrate this new product?
- Will I need to bring in additional equipment and/or staff to integrate this product?
- Will this create downtime and pause workflow to put this product into my system? Will that take days? Weeks? Months?
- Will this new product have legacy issues?
By not addressing these considerations ahead of time, companies are at risk of losing business productivity – both time and money.
At BOHH Labs, we believe that enhanced security should not come at the expense of enterprise productivity.
As a software and infrastructure agnostic appliance, BOHH’s security solution is easily deployed on top of the existing enterprise system between the infrastructure and firewall to protect data without impacting performance or hindering the core role of the system it defends. Because our solution leverages existing infrastructure investments, we enable companies to maximize ROI, and eliminate overhaul of the infrastructure, overhead in terms of equipment or staff, and downtime to implement or lag time on the disparate underlying system, which reduces disruption to business production and workflow. Additionally, our solution allows companies to rapidly upgrade existing legacy infrastructure to provide secure cloud services without loss of security, access or speed as there is no need for data migration.
In fact, once the application is implemented, there is no other work needed to keep it running and protecting your data or future upgrades. This means zero compromise to
By ensuring easy implementation of our solution, we help reduce both direct and indirect costs resulting from business disruption, as well as financial loss due to downtime or disruption to customer accessibility and experience. Additionally depending on the security solution deployed we can help meet Regulatory Compliance such as elements of GDPR.
Now that we’ve taken a deeper dive into how BOHH’s solution can seamlessly fit in to existing infrastructures enabling businesses to enhance productivity and maximize ROI, come back next Tuesday to address a situation a majority of companies are facing: how to comply with GDPR regulations and integrate news tools to meet the data security requirements. We will address how BOHH Labs’ security solution can help organizations successfully address GDPR requirements.
