In the era of digital transformation, cybersecurity is advancing by leaps and bounds to respond to the rise in cyberattacks
Although many companies have focused their efforts and investments on forceful actions against cyber attacks to guarantee the continuity of their activity, the room for improvement is high. According to the Ascendant report on Digital Maturity in Cybersecurity 2021 by SIA and Minsait , 56% of organizations still have a well-defined cybersecurity strategy as a pending issue.
This situation requires plans and protection measures against the threats posed by what SIA calls the four forces of digitization (regulations and regulatory framework, transformation of IT systems, adoption of the Internet of Things and industrial solutions, and growing digital interaction between people) and evolve towards a new model: Digitally Protected Organization.
The roadmap plans to identify risks, implement protection actions, determine a strategy to detect possible attacks, have specialists to be able to react effectively and have the capacity to recover from them. To tackle it successfully, SIA, a leading cybersecurity company through which Minsait, the Indra company specializing in digitization , provides services in this area, proposes eleven keys to minimizing risk and maximizing business protection:
1. Legal and regulatory compliance. The regulatory and legislative environment is quite complex and determines many of the actions to be implemented, so it is necessary to have specialists who combine technical and legal knowledge that provide flexibility to adapt security solutions to different sectors and platforms, minimizing the risks derived from non-compliance (economic due to sanctions, operational, reputational…).
2. Make employees and users aware of information security and the protection of critical assets. They are the first line of defense against a cyber attack – 90% are initiated through social engineering techniques – and their awareness and training are a necessity for organizations and a legal requirement.
3. Business continuity plans. Defining and implementing backup and disaster recovery strategies are essential to prevent data loss and reduce downtime caused by external threats, network unavailability, human error, and other service interruptions.
4. Definition of a robust security architecture. In the IT world, the protection of multicloud environments, application security, secure software development, and service alert management are key in the implementation of solutions.
5. Implement a Cybersecurity Plan. With the priorities, the people in charge and the resources that are going to be used to improve the security level in the organization, and with the technical, organizational and legal content projects, coordinated through a technical office.
6. Threat detection and effective response. Identifying digital assets is crucial for an organization and is the first step in managing its vulnerabilities and detecting possible threats with the ultimate goal of responding effectively to cyber incidents and thus maximizing business resilience.
7. Digital identity management. Controlling the rights to which services and which profiles each person in an organization has is essential. Artificial intelligence in the profiling processes together with multiple factor authentication and unified sign-on solutions, in addition to the protection of privileged accounts and access to data, guarantee a trustworthy environment for users of information systems.
8. Digital registration of clients or Digital Onboarding. Carry out their incorporation through identification technology and the use of biometric elements that provide them with a secure environment to carry out their operations. These digital transactions must start with identity registration processes in real time and anywhere that guarantee and protect the user from the beginning of the relationship.
9. Digital signature solutions to secure business processes. The digitization of processes requires completing transactions with a digital signature in an agile, time and cost efficient manner, and with full legal guarantees. A cloud solution makes it easy to integrate with applications, ensuring archiving and retrieval.
10. Risk of fraud. It is essential to prevent any type of fraud that may affect an organization with proactive tools and exercises, and to detect inappropriate behavior and actions by customers or employees through the implementation of modular solutions for transactional or electronic commerce processes, complemented by control by expert agents.
11. Digital risk management. The progressive digitization of organizations and their processes has exponentially increased the number of existing threats, introducing new risk vectors. The key is to have the capabilities to identify and manage them, aligned with the business strategy.
