Security is Job 1: Machines vs. Machines

Digital is redefining cybercrime and cyberwarfare.

Cyberattacks today are multi-stage, hard to discover and highly targeted. Some security threats are accidental, stemming from unauthorized employee access. As much as 38% of attacks come from internal breaches.

In other instances, hackers test perimeters, phish, penetrate and lurk (sometimes with a dwell time of up to 100 days), locate weak information policies, procedures and systems, or breach the network laterally. Once inside, information can be leaked out slowly or exploited en masse.

You must assume the bad actors are already inside your network. What are these bad actors after? The most valuable enterprise resource: information.

For the Intelligent and Connected Enterprise, information security is Job 1.

Information at Risk

Firewalls and other traditional security measures are no longer enough to secure enterprise information. Vulnerabilities permeate all levels of enterprise IT systems, and the Intelligent and Connected Enterprise must be prepared to deal with both internal and external security threats.

Now, more than ever, organizations require the latest information security tools to collect, analyze and remediate urgent threats.

There is an expanding window of exposure for breaches. On average, it takes almost 200 days to detect a breach, and then a month to resolution. The security of the future will combine knowledge (machine learning), insights (AI), and autonomic action (autonomous clouds) to compress the time it takes to detect a breach and move beyond resolution to learning.

Windows of Exposure Need to Shrink

Machines are attacking humans, and we cannot fight them. We need to use machines to fight the machines.

It is no longer human vs. human, or human vs. machine… it is machine vs. machine. In an information economy, organizations will rely on machines to help manage data, intellectual property (IP) and the growing number of digital identities associated with connected technologies. Also, organizations will use machines to battle other machines in a cyberattack.

Information lies at the heart of these attacks. This includes everything from customer information to employee information, product designs, payments, orders, invoices, machine-to-machine or IoT data and more.

As the lifeblood of business, information needs to be protected. Enterprise Information Management (EIM) is a digital platform that helps to ensure the integrity, accuracy, compliance and protection of information throughout its lifecycle—whether it is design documents for a fighter jet, trading partner information in a SWIFT network, payment information in a bank or employee information in a government database.

Statistics show that data breaches will continue to accelerate. It is currently estimated that over six million records are lost or stolen in a breach every single day.

Total Security: The Immune System for Business

Information, security and compliance requirements are merging into a single challenge that must be fought on multiple fronts.

Comprehensive information security is the immune system for business. EIM arms the Intelligent and Connected Enterprise with the security tools and approaches it needs to discover and recover from information breaches.

As a critical aspect of a complete security platform, endpoint forensics collect information, monitor behavior, send notifications and help to automate incident response to minimize risk.

As digital extends business into a global ecosystem, the need to manage and protect multiple systems, relationships and identities is growing. An Identity and Access Management (IAM) platform enables organizations to centrally manage the entire identity lifecycle of their users, as well as their access to critical resources across their business ecosystems.

Discovery solutions deliver the gold-standard of digital forensics and unstructured data analytics for searching, collecting and investigating enterprise data to manage legal obligations and risk.

New regulations will require new ways to classify data. Auto-classification is the next-generation solution that combines industry-leading records management with semantic capabilities for classification of content.

As the immune system for business, EIM ensures that Security is Job 1 for the Intelligent and Connected Enterprise. It helps organizations all over the world to manage data, IP and the explosion of digital identities and endpoints associated with connected technologies.

If you like this series, download my recent book, The Intelligent and Connected Enterprise.

How have recent high-profile data breaches changed the way you approach information security, in your personal life or within a business context?