Winning the Security War = Cloud + A Hands Free, Zero Touch Environment, writes Bilal Mujahid, pictured, CISO for email and cyber product company iManage.
The past year has taken its toll on cyber-security teams. The widespread remote working brought on by the covid-19 pandemic, coupled with the incessant and wide-ranging onslaught of threats, is causing burnout of cyber-security professionals, recent research reports find. Who could blame them for feeling overwhelmed? By some estimates, cyberattacks are up 400 per cent compared to pre-covid levels. At times, it must seem as if they’re participating in a never-ending war against a highly motivated foe who has no incentive to ever give up.
Cyber criminals, for their part, are adhering to the age-old strategy of “going where the money is.” They have learned that they only need to launch a single successful ransomware attack against a financial services organisation or legal firm in order to pocket a tremendous amount of cash.
Just how much money are we talking about? The average ransomware demand in 2020 steadily ratcheted upwards to nearly USD $180,000, and there’s no reason to think that this number will go down in 2021. Criminals know that organisations can’t afford to not have access to their data and that they will pay whatever ransom is necessary to get their data back.
There’s good news, though, for those cybersecurity professionals who are at the end of their figurative ropes and feeling burned out from constantly swatting away one cyber-attack after another: The security war doesn’t have to be so difficult. There’s a way to fight it that isn’t just better for preventing burnout, but also strengthens the overall security posture of the organisation.
The ongoing “security war” is really only a winnable fight if it takes place in the cloud. Whenever an enterprise adds a new application or data store to their on-premises network, what they’re really doing is increasing their security exposure and painting a bigger target on their back for the bad guys to home in on.
There’s no need to fight the bad guys on that battlefield. Over-taxed cyber-security professionals are already tearing their hair out striving to protect the on-premises infrastructure from every possible angle while at the same time keeping it up and running 24/7.
The cloud is a logical move for many reasons, starting with the fact that most cloud vendors have more resources that they can dedicate to security than all but the most deep-pocketed, well-resourced organisations.
The more that enterprises can remove systems and data from on-premises environments and shift them to the cloud, the more they’ll reduce the size of the target on their back, and the better off they’ll be. The systems that should make the leap aren’t just the likes of payroll and sales, or document management – security technologies such as identity management and threat monitoring also need to shift from on-premises to the cloud.
Of course, not all clouds are created equal. One built on the Zero Trust security framework is essential to providing the highest level of protection for critical assets. By assuming absolutely no level of trust – whether that’s trust of networks, trust between host and applications, or even trust of super users or administrators – organisations eliminate vulnerabilities from both internal actors, as well as unauthorised users attempting to infiltrate a network.
For Zero Trust to deliver on this promise, however, Zero Touch must be at the heart of it. While most cloud vendors allow for a small number of trusted resources to have access to the customer data, Zero Touch ensures that nobody has access. It’s a “hands free” environment.
Taking the human out of the equation for everything from routine server maintenance to more advanced troubleshooting – ensuring that they don’t actually have hands-on access to sensitive data – significantly strengthens security and reduces risk. That’s because very often, what the bad guys are exploiting is human vulnerabilities: someone clicking on something they shouldn’t that then propagates the ransomware throughout the system.
It’s worth mentioning here that a Zero Trust framework – as well as a Zero Touch approach – is not something that can be retroactively “bolted on” to an existing cloud. A cloud needs to have been designed from the beginning with this framework in mind. For this reason, security leaders at enterprises should be demanding Zero Touch from cloud vendors to ensure that their data is as secure as possible in the cloud.
Cyber-security is a demanding job even under the best of circumstances, let alone in the midst of a pandemic – and the threat of burnout is real when IT professionals feel like they’re under constant assault by the bad guys.
Fortunately, a move to the cloud – especially one designed with both Zero Trust and Zero Touch in mind – offers cybersecurity teams a better chance of winning the security war. It levels the playing field and creates a fairer fight, taking the pressure off of these professionals.
Think of it as working smarter, not harder – and getting better results for the entire organisation.
About the author
Bilal Mujahid is Chief Information Security Officer at iManage, where he is accountable for cloud security and certification as part of the company’s senior leadership team. Bilal has over two decades of experience in IT and IT security. Visit www.iManage.com.
