Under the hood: Enterprise IT Security

When you log in on a Monday morning, a steaming cup of coffee in hand and your trusted company laptop booting up, it’s unlikely the first thought that crosses your mind is a cyber-attack.

It is fair to assume that your company is doing enough to prevent a hack, outage or breach from ruining your Monday morning and putting a big spanner in your day’s plans and schedule. And indeed your organization is protecting you and your chances of getting affected by any of these.

IT infrastructure protection is a complex business. Where would one start? Especially if you are a security leader in your organization. Let us take for example, as you sip on that hot delicious coffee, your mouse hovers over your company’s ERP system, you need to download some reports from the portal. You double click the icon and you are taken to the portal in a jiffy.

In this simple process the following things have taken place:

1.????Your ERP system credentials have to been accessed as the application needs to run for you, an authorized user. A precaution to ensure your login is secure and safe means having a secret manager set up that handles this diligently.

2.????As you access your ERP software, which is on a cloud server, an SSH (secure shell) key and its management software are engaged to protect your machine from the open network, a dangerous place where data is vulnerable to attacks easily.

3.????Your reports are in a database which you will be downloading anytime now. A hack of this can give out a lot of sensitive information about your organization and your work. A key management system employed by your organization will have the express role of managing this database and keeping vigil.

4.????As you commence downloading these reports, there is Data in transit or motion from a data base (server) to your machine. A PKI and certificate management system tracks this communication via keys and certificates continuously and ensures there are no rogue certificates, expired ones or any other challenges that can stop these machines from communicating and hence your download completes successfully.

5.????Even as you view these reports, your own machine is being monitored and kept secure. This is being done by an IT admin who will have a level of access to your machine which you would not. Even the ERP application will need this privileged access at times. But privileged access means hackers will try extra hard for this. Hence a privileged access management system would be needed and your organization would have the best ones to safeguard you.

6.????Finally, HSMs or physical computing devices help safeguard and manage digital keys, perform encryptions and decryption functions. These devices will be active in the background even as you access and work on your local machine. Another level of safety to prevent those reports from reaching the wrong hands.

The process of downloading a report early morning seemed such a mundane and simple task a few minutes back did it not?

With constant vigil, preemptive measures and software products that are robust and effective, organizations and security leaders constantly battle impending attacks and lapses that could be disastrous.

So, sip on that delightful coffee and go through your report, your download was one of the most secure endeavors done with forethought and planning by your organization.