Enhancing your Digital Trust in the New Normal

Over the last couple of weeks, we see a considerable number of offline processes, which we never thought would be online somehow migrating to the Internet; schools, after school classes, medical consultations, shopping of essentials and many more. We see an amplified use of web-based platforms such as Zoom, Webex and Google classrooms. Market researches indicate that there is about 84% increase in the use of remote working tools since February 2020.

With more and more people getting used to the “new normal” of connecting remotely, there are few things that are getting added to the essentials for organizations.

• Remote Access to organizational resources and critical applications: Now, more than ever, almost all critical functions are performed remotely. The access provisions are majorly given through VPNs, which increases the current load on the VPNs. A quicker option to balance it is by routing the access to only the critical applications/business functions through VPNs.

• BYOD- Organizations are allowing employees to bring their devices to access business content. During the immediate surge of remote working needs, many organizations found this to be a quicker option to enable their employees. So today, we have so many devices connected to the corporate networks.
• Accelerated plans to move more work loads to cloud : Need for scalability, higher performance and elasticity have become priorities not only to minimize the sudden load on infrastructure but to be able to run the business at optimal cost with minimal overheads.

71% of UK-based business decision makers believe the shift to 100% remote working during the COVID-19 crisis has increased the likelihood of a cyber-breach according to research by Centrify. 

Further, IBM X Force Research indicates that there is a 14000% increase in COVID-19 related scan since February 2020.

The newly enforced need to reinvent themselves with engaging omni-channel digital experiences also demands more robust access management practices. Many organizations have very widely disconnected Identity and Access Management practices that make it more challenging to orchestrate the access provisioning, approvals and review in short span with minimal support teams.

Cybersecurity projects are often the ones that are pushed back due to budget constraints or scarce. Identity and Access management projects often have a history of failures due to the complexities, wrong choice of technologies or not being able to integrate business critical applications. With the Covid-19 pandemic, Identity and Access Management and projects to enhance your Digital Trust will now see a push to the forefront. Here are some of the compelling reasons.

1. Identity and access management: There is a need to authenticate and verify every employee working remotely. They need to be authenticated to provision access to the business critical applications and resources based on their roles. This demands an urgent need for Identity and Access Management (IAM), Multiple Factor Authentication (MFA) and Privileged Access management. One single solution may not meet all your needs to cater to BYOD, hybrid and multi-cloud identities, access to complex applications and even IOT devices.
2. Identity Governance: Effective administration of Identity governance life cycle will be key in reducing the overall cycle time of access provisioning and management. The more automated processes flows are implemented in the identity life cycle, the faster it will be to provision accesses especially when organizations are moving to remote provisioning in a short notice in pandemic situations like this. On the long run, the access re-certification and validation processes will strengthen your Digital Trust posture for distinct identities that the organizations deal with.
3. Consumer Identity Management (CIAM): When the business needs to function with minimal workforce, providing an uninterrupted customer experience with minimal human intervention will be vital. To help organizations to meet these challenging requirements, IBM Security offers a turnkey consumer identity and access management (CIAM) program for a personalized, omni-channel and secure interaction between the consumer and providers.
4. Adaptive Access: A robust Identity Management system for the Hybrid environment that support out of the box integrations and simplified access provisioning will be a key tool in the Digital Trust valet. With BYOD and work from anywhere practices becoming essential for business continuity, adaptive access that leverages robust artificial intelligence (AI) technology to build deep contextual insights to determine the level of trust or risk associated with each user. This allows organizations to optimize both security and user experience, without making trade-offs.
5. Decentralized Identity – Decentralized Identity will enable individuals and organizations to achieve a more trusted exchange of information in both the digital and physical worlds. This will help organizations to offload the burden of managing the personal information of their consumers in the long run. IBM is leading the way, partnering with organizations in multiple industries, and driving many of the emerging interoperability standards that are required in this next generation of identity.

There are many more elements that organizations will continue to prioritize to elevate their Digital Trust posture during the new normal, such as database access monitoring, identity analytics, crown jewels protection, data leakage prevention etc.

Below are some of the immediate actions that organizations must take to strengthen their Digital Trust posture to protect and enable remote workforce.

• Help protect devices connected remotely
• Safeguard users and devices
• Better secure expanding environments

IBM’s  digital trust offering is designed to tackle the risks and challenges that are introduced by digitization, and hence will be a pertinent reference point for organizations to plan their next actions.