By Ripu Bajwa, Director & General Manager, Data Protection Solutions, Dell Technologies, India
With the year progressing and snowballing different opportunities and challenges, one common trend that has taken businesses by storm is the rise of cyber-attacks and security breaches. According to a report, India has witnessed a 37% increase in cyberattacks in the first quarter of 2020 as compared to 2019. Attackers have found and developed innovative ways to penetrate security defenses undetected and have forced businesses to relook at their defense strategies.
In the current times, employees are mostly relying on their mobile phones, computers, laptops etc. to connect to the company’s network and perform business tasks. Hence, a centralized security solution will not be able to meet the evolving security demands. As a result, security teams have figured that they need to keep their employees at the front line of the company’s endpoint security. Through this, they will be able to secure every endpoint connecting to a network to block attempts and other risky activities right at the points of entry.
However, most organizations still base their solutions on remediation, a reactive approach wherein it’s assumed that a cyber-threat will penetrate their network and action will be taken post that to minimize the damage. This approach is very ancient in its ways and does not guarantee a full protection in today’s cyber threat landscape, which can create havoc in just minutes. Thus, it becomes imperative to take a proactive approach wherein security managers can stop malware before it can execute anything. Here are some tips organizations can follow to become more proactive in their endpoint security approach.
Identifying threats being faced by your organization – It is important for businesses to realize and accept that the security landscape has changed and will continue to change. As a result, businesses working remotely have opened the gates to much larger cyber-attacks and ransomware activities. Hence, it is important to know where your most sensitive data is stored and ensure that it is safe.
Assessing your Businesses Security tools – Before deploying new solutions, it is vital to look at the solutions and cyber security tools that you already have in place. Ensuring firmware is up to date becomes extremely crucial with the dependency of organizations increasing on cloud to maintain business continuity.
Building the right Data Protection strategy – Data is the most valuable asset for any organization and when thinking about a strategy for its protection, you need to think about security. Organizations need to look at how users are accessing data, where is it being used, if there is a possibility of setting up a policy around that, etc. in order to find the best possible solution.
Backup Security Plan – In cases wherein your endpoint measures fail and result in a breach of data, incident response becomes the key for recovery. Trained incident response professionals at the organization can then easily take charge and identify the root cause of the problem. Post identification of the issue, necessary changes and action can be taken to prevent the same from happening in the future.
Evolving security practices – Data protection is not a onetime task, it is a continuous processes. As your business evolves, your data protection strategy also needs to evolve in order to protect against future threats.
Traditional approaches to security are no longer enough. As employees work will continue to work remotely, it becomes the job of the security managers to ensure that their information is protected and that they have access to safe applications and software. More and more organizations will find the answer to their security problem in endpoint security where they can reduce the risk of harmful data breaches, ensure advance threat prevention and can also avoid remediation cost in the long run.
