You need to protect your organization’s valuable digital assets from a large and growing range of cyber attacks and malicious actions. The size of your firm’s attack surface is also growing, given the sizeable number of devices used by employees and the increasing number of employees working remotely.
Your firm’s security posture has to address current and potential vulnerabilities, detail how you respond to and recover from incidents, ensure regulatory compliance and data privacy, and much more. In today’s ever-changing cybersecurity environment the only way to do this is to merge traditional data management with data privacy and data ownership concerns. How should you do this?
Understanding Your Organization’s Security Posture
According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an organization’s security posture concerns the security status of the firm’s networks, data, and systems in defending against potential cyber threats. Defining your organization’s security posture includes evaluating the following:
- Data assets
- Attack surface
- Controls and processes available to protect against cyberattacks
- Ability to predict and detect attacks and data breaches
- Ability to contain identified attacks and breaches
- Ability to react to and recover from attacks and breaches
Creating a Multi-Faceted Security Posture
According to an IDG survey, 78% of senior IT leaders lack confidence in their firm’s security postures. They’re rethinking what a modern security posture should entail.
The reality is that a security posture is not static. Your firm’s security posture should be able to adapt in response to new cyber threats and vulnerabilities, as well as evolving expectations regarding data privacy and ownership.
As such, a robust security posture today should merge three important disciplines: data management, data privacy, and data ownership. Your security posture should address these issues holistically as part of an inclusive strategy.
Data Management
Data management has long been at the core of a robust security posture. Traditionally, a firm’s security posture revolved around that firm’s data – assessing data status, protecting data at risk and in transit, responding to data breaches, recovering stolen or damaged data, and so forth. With this approach data management expands to include data security and everything necessary to protect that data from cyberattack.
Data management remains central to the new multi-faceted approach to establishing your organization’s security posture. It is data, in all its various types and forms that drives your organization and must be protected from malicious actors. All traditional data-centric approaches to cybersecurity remain important and must continue to be updated in response to new and evolving cyber threats.
Data Privacy
Data management, however, is just one facet of the new expanded security posture. It’s not just that your data must be protected from attack; it also needs to be managed to protect the privacy of your customers and other involved parties.
Data privacy is important because protecting sensitive data builds customer trust. Protecting customer data is also necessary to comply with a variety of governmental and industry privacy regulations. Noncompliance with these regulations can result in thousands of dollars or more in fines – and much larger amounts if customer data is breached. To comply with these privacy regulations you must have a strong security posture, in terms of both data privacy and data management.
Data privacy also benefits from restricting access to sensitive data. Access to customer data should be limited only to those employees with a verified need. By restricting access to this data you not only adhere to privacy standards but you also reduce the number of potential attack points for malicious actors. The fewer people accessing key data, the lower the risk of breach or attack.
Data Ownership
The final leg of a modern security posture is data ownership. Data ownership is the next evolution of data privacy; moving beyond simply protecting customer data, data ownership shifts the responsibility for customer data back on consumers themselves. Customers can and should now have ownership of their personal data and they decide what data can be shared, how, and with what entities. Your organization still has the responsibility of protecting customer data entrusted to your care, but there will probably be less of it as customers decide not to share as much information going forward.
In this regard, enabling customers to retain ownership of their data and decide what data they share becomes an important part of your company’s security posture. A complete security posture now involves assigning data ownership, protecting data privacy, and managing and securing all data entrusted to you.
Employ Wickr as Part of Your Security Posture
Data management and security applies not only to stored data (data at rest) but also to data in transit. This means securing all communications and data transfers, preferably via end-to-end encryption. Wickr’s secure communications and collaboration platform employs robust end-to-end encryption and other military-grade security to ensure that text, voice, and video communications and data files cannot hijacked or breached. This protects your firm’s data and your customers’ privacy, ensuring a strong next-generation security posture for your organization.
Contact Wickr today to learn more about developing an effective security posture for your organization.