Cyber Security

Last week, we shared the first episode in our new series of webinars on trending technologies. This episode discusses cyber security during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

Hosted by: Ryan Armogan Customer Engagement Lead at Incepta

Featured guest: Ishtiaq Ahmed Managing Partner at Incepta

 

Continue reading for the pressing questions and insightful answers relating to this worldwide phenomenon that is accelerating digital transformation across the globe.

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Q1: With the current state of COVID-19 and business slowly resuming, how would you describe the implications on security in general?

A1: COVID-19 has been a remarkable experience for all of us. Although we are seeing a gradual re-opening, enterprises have already been adopting new norms. We see a major trend in shifting everything to the cloud.

Cloud security has become a topic of concern now, more than ever before. More employees are working remotely and that brings the challenge of protecting private data. We are seeing a strong surge in technologies like two-factor authentication, edge security, and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).

Overall, this is an exciting time for security professionals as their expertise is in high demand.

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Q2: What are some of the trends that organizations will be adopting in order to strengthen their enterprise security strategy?

A2: Security is gaining increased prominence in the enterprise budget, even before the pandemic hit. As mentioned, cloud security is a fast-growing area where many customers are focusing.

Almost every company is opting for cyber security insurance to protect their business from hard-hitting incidents like data breaches.

We also see a growing trend in passwordless authentication. Gartner has predicted that up to 90% of mid-size companies will adopt passwordless policies in their systems.

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Q3: Identity and Access Management can present major issues, especially for enterprise organizations, which may have hundreds of systems to manage and protect. What would be your recommendation to mitigate overall risks?

A3: On average, an employee in an enterprise environment can switch between job-critical applications more than 1,100 times every day. Imagine if these employees had to authenticate themselves each time!

Centralizing identity and access management should be considered a key initiative for any company yet to start the journey.

Fortunately, there are many solutions available to meet this need. From specialized companies like Okta, to major tech players like Amazon and IBM, many options are available.

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Q4: Security breaches are receiving increased focus in news media and can destabilize even the strongest companies. How can organizations protect against these breaches? 

A4: Data breaches can be a worst-case-scenario for any company. Modern cyber attacks have the potential to cause global catastrophe. A large enterprise that suffers a data breach could expect to lose upward of $4M.

We have been helping our customers with strategies and policies to mitigate such extreme risks.

Our solutions are focused on security as an integral component of the IT project lifecycle; from infrastructure and functional requirements to production launch.

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Q5: Across industries, companies continue to take an open approach to data, making it more accessible. What are the negatives to this approach?

A5: Democratizing data is a key initiative that we see throughout industries. Standards such as FedRAMP, FHIR, Open Banking, and TM Forum, they all talk about opening data outside the boundaries of the corporation.

APIs are the building blocks of enterprise systems nowadays, which brings the challenge of API security. APIs will be the widest avenue for hackers to gain access to corporate data.

Technologies like API gateways should be considered essential to all corporations, in order to protect their APIs.

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 Q6: How is Incepta helping clients with their security challenges during the pandemic and beyond? 

A6: Being a security focused company, we have been involved in some truly interesting work with our customers lately. We have also compiled an extensive library of security policies, which is constantly evaluated and improved through customer interaction.

A popular service we offer is an integrated continuous security assessment of existing and new code as projects are developed.

We also target our efforts towards protecting APIs by using leading API gateway platforms such as the Anypoint API Manager from MuleSoft. All of our integration and automation solutions now contain security as an integral component. Our message to customers is simple – think of security everywhere, everytime! 

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