While embarking on a digital transformation journey, firms need to ensure that their infrastructure meets the expected level of security
CEOs have always focused on implementing digital transformation journeys to deliver innovative business models, creating new digital customer experiences, and to optimize and automate processes to ensure enhanced business performance.
Despite all these advances, organizations are constantly under pressure to prevent attacks on digital technologies that are leveraged to transform the business. Enterprises need to fight cyber-threats and stop them from becoming a hurdle to their digital transformation initiatives. Data security needs to be part of the very fabric of every digital enterprise for them to transform.
Organizations need to move on to a digital transformation journey only once they are assured about their security framework, tools, and structure. Businesses can transform when they become ‘secure to the core,’ with a defined framework in place to secure all digital transformation efforts.
Continuous monitoring
The first key pillar to secure digital transformation for organizations is to monitor everything across IT and operational technology in real-time. Enterprises today need to possess a plethora of security tools to strengthen their infrastructure across the increasing number of endpoints – firewalls, networks, servers, devices, applications, storage, data, etc.
With the humongous volume of data generated each day, it is almost impossible for firms to identify and respond to the true cyber-threats. Enterprises need to be confident about fighting breaches by applying automation and intelligence to handle the enormous volume of incidents occurring across the globe.
Verify and encrypt
In addition to monitoring, the other two critical activities IT teams need to ensure for securing the enterprise are – verification and encryption.
For verification of IDs, firms need to adopt a zero-trust security approach to access and digital identity management. Identity and access management needs to be established conclusively as an essential parameter to strengthen the digital transformation efforts.
Encryption is essential to minimize the risk of unauthorized or unlawful processing of business-critical information. It serves to avoid destruction or damage to data or any other accidental loss. All sensitive data requires proper tokenization or encryption using trusted services, encryption solutions, and rights management to prevent data loss from malicious cyberattacks.
Having an effective defense system in place
A future-proof their cyber-defense mechanism is required for companies to be ‘secure to the core.’ They need to adopt an approach that provides next-generation digital services. It has to run with an enhanced degree of automation through a security platform, applying lean processes, in-depth analytics, and incidence management processes. The underlying technologies – described as SOAR – security, orchestration, automation, and response – are getting increasingly popular.
IDC describes such cybersecurity technologies as AIRO – Analytics, Incident, Response, and Orchestration. The AIRO technologies trace the requirements in the Security Operations Center (SOC) to adequately protect the enterprise network with effective threat detection and formal remediation.
Whether organizations decide to adopt “SOAR” or “AIRO” technologies, they must apply automation to cyber defenses to keep up with the massive volume of data and incidents generated across a wide array of endpoints and infrastructure.
The occurrence of cyberattacks on organizations has shot up, but the sophisticated methods to counter these heightened threats have also evolved at a similar pace. It is crucial for businesses to first get the security framework in place before embarking on their digital transformation journey.
