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Security Tips for Remote and Mobile Working

Security tips for remote working

Mobile security plays a big role in staying safe as many companies want to enable their employees to work securely on smartphones or tablets while they are on the road or away from the office – but they often fail due to IT security requirements. In order to achieve the highest possible security and data protection, companies must implement organizational and technical measures, to protect corporate data and systems.

 

Here below is a list of a few tips that can help employees to protect their organization’s security:

 

    • Free Public WiFi: Working on free WiFi can be attempting for employees who pay for their own data plans. They must be aware that these networks are not secure enough to use when logging into secure systems or transmitting sensitive information (customer data, credit card numbers, etc.). They must access companies’ data via their secure connection at home or enable their 4G for secure connectivity when they are on travel.

 

    • VPN: companies that have employees using remote access applications, should use a VPN. With its help, employees can get a flexible connection on different online services and protect the traffic. VPNs allow the creation of a secure tunnel by means of data encryption during the connection. And as it grants access to all work applications and information employees haves feeling of working from the office.

 

    • Password management: When it comes to password management, employees use to take it very light. A good password management is the key to remote working security. Access to the applications containing crucial business and customer’s data must be protected with a strong password that contains at least eight characters, among which there must be capitals, low case letters, numbers, and special characters.

 

    • Two-Factor Authentication: Two-factor authentication is also considered for password protection. It adds an additional layer of security to the authentication process and makes it harder for attackers to gain access to employees’ devices or online accounts. It’s used to limit and control unwanted access to sensitive data.

 

    • Remote Access Applications: organizations must define which applications and data employees can use with their mobile devices, email programs including calendars and contacts, a browser, a document repository, and product and pricing databases.

 

    • Data Encryption: Protecting organizations’ and customers’ personal data is vitally important to the success of any organization. Encrypting that data with one of the best practices to be on the safe side. In the case of remote working, sending emails with sensitive data represents a huge risk. It could be intercepted or seen by a third party. If you encrypt the data attached to an email, it will prevent an unintended recipient from viewing the information. Also, be sure your device is set to have all stored data encrypted in the case of theft.

 

    • GDPR: As GDPR requires companies to have a 180-degree overview of the existing data, they must make data roadmaps with information such as, where the data is located, who is using the data – and is that data is being used in office equipment or remote devices.

 

    • Physical security: Employees must pay extra attention to their devices or files that contains companies’ important data once it’s out of the office perimeter and it’s not in use. Devices with important data in it, must not be left unsecured and unattended in any circumstance.

 

Remote employment is becoming more and more famous thanks to the advanced technologies and the flexibility it offers. Business must give extra attention to the security issues that can come along with the deployment of remote work. They must work on strategies that protect employees and business against cybercrime and offers a safe remote workplace.

4 Basic Tips for a Successful Transition to the Cloud

4 Basic Tips for a Successful Transition to the Cloud

IT managers nowadays have to deal with a wide variety of challenges that comes with migrating to the cloud. Although cloud usage has become widespread in recent years, some companies still feel that they have not yet reached the full potential of the cloud.

However, the reasons for this are easy to identify, and cloud usage can be optimized using a few basic measures. Transaction to the cloud successfully means having an experienced partner who know exactly your industry requirements and can answer the following questions before the move. Such as how large and complex is company’s data? How important are regulatory considerations? Are company’s current business applications cloud ready? How much your day-to-day operations can tolerate downtime depends on the type of the application involved and what service level agreement does the company require for a cloud environment? If the company decides to change the cloud provider in the future, can the data and applications migrate with them?

 

Once these questions are answered, IT team can choose their cloud partner who can provide a migration plan and offer a cloud customized solution. Keep in mind that performance, security and reliability must be maintained when moving to clouds. Approach the migration in smaller chunks and stay in close coordination with your cloud provider. The goal is for the entire migration to cause minimal disruptions. Here below are few basic tips for a successful cloud migration and management.

 

Prioritize security

In the cloud age, the security of IT applications plays a particularly important role. Before any move to the cloud, IT managers must go through a list of business applications and identify those that they want to migrate. Planning is the key in order to recover any disaster, risk management and other potential situations. As company’s highly sensitive data, which is also used regularly, is moved to these infrastructures or is already stored on the complex architecture of cloud infrastructures, it makes many IT managers sweat.

IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2020  has shown that despite a nominal decline from $3.92 million in the 2019 study to $3.86 million in the 2020 study, the average total cost of a data breach  was much lower for some of the most mature companies and industries and much higher for organizations that lagged behind in areas such as security automation and incident response processes.

With the right security measures, however, risks and financial losses can be significantly minimized. While you might expect it’s your cloud provider’s responsibility to take all security measures, it’s also one of the biggest responsibilities of the customer to ensure their data is secure. Here are some of the methods we recommend at Storm to keep yourself safe when using the cloud. IT managers can ensure their data is secure by using methods such as multi factor authentication, strong passwords, data encryption and regular backups.

 

Understand and Enforce your Cloud Governance Plan

When implementing cloud services, many companies fail to develop a clear governance plan from the start and then consistently adhere to it. Governance, may be defined as an agreed-upon set of policies and standards, which are based on a risk assessment and inclusive of audit, measurement, and reporting procedures, as well as enforcement of policies and standards. Most security leaks in the cloud are due to weak corporate governance practices. In a multi-enterprise or multi-platform cloud environment, a lack of governance can not only lead to the loss of highly sensitive data, but also to considerable financial losses.

Therefore, from the start, companies must not only establish and implement chains of responsibilities, authority and communication to empower people but also establishing measurement, policy and control mechanisms to enable people to carry out their tailored roles and responsibilities towards the respective cloud infrastructure.

 

Prepare your IT teams for cloud

Another challenge that IT departments have to face is the lack of knowledge of employees on the subject of cloud infrastructures. Just like any new technology, your employees need to learn specific skills that allow them to successfully work with the cloud solutions you plan to integrate.  For IT departments, the switch to cloud computing requires not only a different skill set but a different mindset. In order to take all the benefits cloud has to offer, it’s impossible for companies to dive into it without prior training and intelligent strategy. A proper training has a significant impact on cloud adoption, and this is especially true for organizations that invest in more comprehensive training. Once employees undergo training, they can understand where their skills fit and where they can contribute.

 

Optimize the cloud performance

Performance optimization is one of the main reasons why companies switch to the cloud in the first place. Performance optimization on key areas including scalability, concurrency, response time and throughput optimization can help you run better on Cloud. In this optimisation company can correctly select and assign the right resources to a workload or application. Simply put, cloud optimization can help you reduce cloud infrastructure cost and improve your application performance. Once the workload performance, compliance, and cost are correctly and continually balanced against the best-fit infrastructure in real time, efficiency is achieved.

 

Conclusion

The change to the cloud does not happen overnight, nor does it happen with the flick of a finger. You have to invest time, resources, and fund to migrate your applications and data to the cloud successfully. Security risks, a lack of governance, a lack of expertise and performance problems are all challenges that discourage many companies from taking this step. However, as long as companies take a few basic measures, they are well on the way to a successful and secure migration to the cloud.

 

Source :

Cost of a Data Breach Report 2020

Is Your Digital Business 100% Secure?

Is Your Digital Business 100% Secure?

Digital transformation is creating unprecedented opportunity for organizations today. Along with its far-reaching impact and significant changes in business models, it also comes with unprecedented risk. There are companies that are completely digital. Digital technologies such as mobile, cloud and IoT make it possible to offer new conveniences to customers, operate more efficiently than ever and gain other benefits. With the changed way of working, the demands on security have also changed, as those same technologies have also open doors to a new and special type of cyber-attacks. Here below are few security guidelines that must be carefully considered in pursuing digital initiatives.

 

Cybercrime: The Importance of Prevention!
One of the best and reliable way to guard your company against cybercrime is by educating and informing your staff about cybercrime prevention. It wasn’t long ago that data theft was classified as a social phenomenon somewhere between fun and crime. But cybercrime has now developed into a growth market – in a negative sense.
In a there  2020 Cyberthreat Defense Report, CyberEdge Group found that 81% of surveyed organizations were affected by a successful cyber attack in 2019. The average downtime due to a ransomware attack was 16.2 days in Q4 of 2019 compared to 12.1 days in Q3.
As more and more data is available digitally, the total volume of criminal activity increases. Computers and smartphones are affected equally. Therefore, by teaching your employees to recognize warning signs, you could also enhance your cybercrime prevention strategy.

 

Hardware Security Is a Must!
When it comes to protecting your device, wo-factor authentication (or 2FA offer a whole new level of security for your personal or business devices. It’s a software-based system that send you a text message or email to confirm your identity. In addition to 2FA, you should also invest in a degree of physical protection for your secure hardware in order to prevent disasters. You may also get a tailor-made insurance coverage for your devices. Protecting the hardware alone is too short-sighted. Ultimately, it’s about the corporate data, some of which is stored on the device, some in the cloud somewhere on the network.

 

Secure Basic Configuration

The basic settings for  Internet-enabled devices such as smartphones and laptops include the security settings in the device. These can vary from manufacturer to manufacturer. Apps and operating system should always be kept up to date on one device. The automatic setup for installing available updates is indispensable, because many attacks come via known security holes on the devices.

 

Use Encrypted Data Transmission

Protecting organization’s and customers’ personal data is vitally important to the success of any organization. Encrypting that data is one of the best practices to be on the safe side. In case of remote working, sending emails with sensitive data represents a huge risk. It could be intercepted or seen by a third party. If you encrypt the data attached to an email, it will prevent an unintended recipient from viewing the information. Also, be sure your device is set to have all stored data encrypted in the case of theft.

 

Avoid Public Hotspots!

Working on a free WiFi can be attempting for employees who pay for their own data plans. Public hotspots in a café or in the airport are often unencrypted. Employees must be aware that these networks are not secure enough to use when logging into secure systems or transmitting sensitive information (customer data, credit card numbers, etc.). They must access to companies’ data via their secure connection at home or enable their 4G for a secure connectivity when they are on travel.

 

Regularly Perform a Backup Copy

Regularly back-up important data and information. Determine which data should be backed up, how often it should be backed up and where the copy will be saved. Keep this backup in a safe place and make sure it is always disconnected from the network. Also, if you notice that you have been infected, immediately disconnect from the network.
Also, keep information on your computer that is not connected to the network or on paper, such as important e-mail addresses and phone numbers, or information about your Internet service provider.

 

Cyber Crime Insurance

Cybercrime insurance is suitable for protecting companies against the consequences of IT attacks. Either the attack is internal or external, it can lead to a complete shutdown of operations and digital business activities to a standstill, resulting in downtime costs. In these cases, cybercrime insurance steps in and pays the costs. Extendedand personalized policies also bear the expenses incurred for data recovery or legal advice. In short, crime policies cover the direct loss of your funds, whether through maleficence, employee dishonesty or social engineering. So that things don’t get out of hands, business must take basic protective measures.

Is Your Public Cloud Data Secure?

Is Your Public Cloud Data Secure?

 

With advancing digitalization, business requirements are also developing rapidly. The rise of cloud applications shows no signs of slowing down. More and more organizations continue to adopt cloud computing at a rapid pace to benefit from increased efficiency, better scalability, and faster deployments. According to a report by Linker, the global public cloud computing market is expected to reach $623.3 billion by 2023. The rapid provision of business applications for the introduction of new, improved business processes is central. Many companies consider outsourcing workloads to the public cloud as a priority. High availability, scalability and cost efficiency open up the possibility of implementing innovative operational developments with little effort.

 

As more workloads are shifting to the cloud, cybersecurity professionals remain concerned about the security of data, systems, and services in the cloud. the public cloud exposes business to a large number of new threats. Its dynamic character makes that relying on traditional security technologies and approaches isn’t enough. Therefore, many companies have to rethink the risk assessment of the data stored in the cloud.

 

While moving their workloads into public cloud, companies think that their business is automatically protected. Unfortunately, this security is not certain. Amazon, Microsoft and Google do indeed partially secure their cloud, but it is not their core business or priority. So, in order to cope with new security challenges, security teams are forced to update their security posture and strategies.

 

A report by RightScale shows that average business runs 38% of workloads in public and 41% in private cloud. Usually, enterprises run a more significant part of their workloads in a private cloud (46%) and a smaller portion (33%) in the public cloud. Small to medium businesses, on the other hand, prefer to use a public cloud (43%), instead of investing in more expensive private solutions (35%).

The cloud computing statistics also show the public cloud spend is growing three times faster than the private cloud usage.

 

For this survey 786 IT professionals were questioned about their adoption of cloud infrastructure and related technologies. 58% of the respondents represented enterprises with more than 1,000 employees. For majority of them, more than 50% of enterprise workloads and data are expected to be in a public cloud within 12 months. More than half of respondents said they’ll consider moving at least some of their sensitive consumer dataor corporate financial data to the cloud.

 

Even tough public cloud adoption continues to accelerate 83% of enterprises indicate that security is a is one of the top challenge, followed by 82% for managing cloud spend and 79% for governance.

Workloads and data in a public cloud for all organizations

 

Securing the environment in the cloud is one of the biggest challenge or barrier in cloud adoption. If companies want to protect their data in the cloud, they must ensure that the environment is used safely. This requires additional measures at different levels:

 

Secure access with Identity and Access Management (IAM)

 

As the data stored in cloud can be access from any location and any device, access control and whitelisting are among the first and strongest measures to safeguard your cloud. Managing people, roles and identities is primordial in cloud security.

In most companies, user rights for applications, databases, and content are maintained manually in separate access lists. Regulations for dealing with security-relevant technologies are also kept in other places. The lack of automation and distributed access management prevent identity or context attributes that are needed for dynamic Identity and Access Management (IAM) from being considered.

Building an identical repository with clearly defined type of access for each user identity and strict access policies is therefore the first step in the dynamic handling of access rights. For example, it can be specified that employee X login is only permitted from certain geographic locations by secure network connection to access only a selected numbers of files.

While these policies can be managed by different individuals with appropriate authority in the organization, they must exist in a single, reliable, and up-to-date location – across all resources, parameters, and user groups.

 

Data loss prevention (DLP)

 

As data is one of your organization’s most valuable assets, protecting it and keeping it secure must be one of your top priority. In order to accomplish this, a number of DLP controls must be implemented in all cloud applications at various levels and allow IT administrators to intervene. «DLP (Data loss prevention) is the practice of detecting and preventing confidential data from being “leaked” out of an organization’s boundaries for unauthorized use. Data may be physically or logically removed from the organization either intentionally or unintentionally. »

 

Data Encryption

 

Sensitive data may not be transmitted through public networks without adequate encryption. Therefore, one of the most effective cloud security measure that you can take is to encrypt all of your sensitive data in the public cloud. This includes all type of data such as the data at rest inside the cloud and archived and backed-up data, or the data in transit as well. This allows you the complete protection in case of any data exposure, as it remains unreadable and confidential based on your encryption decisions. By encrypting properly data, organizations can also address compliance with government and industry regulations, including GDPR.

HyperScale and Data Management

A hyper-scale data center is mega-sized data centres that have a huge number of computers, network hardware, cooling systems, and are able to support thousands of physical servers and millions of virtual machines. As the technology is growing at exponential rates, big providers such as, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google, IBM Cloud, Oracle, SAP etc are redefining hyper-scale data centres for data storage and optimising speed to deliver the best software experience possible.

 

In this evolving IT landscape, for customers as well as companies, the question arises of which strategy they want to use for their data storage. They can choose from the following two options, either they can outsource and move their data to an external data center facility, either they can choose to move their traditional ‘physical’ data center to the clouds, means instead of investing in their physical hardware’s, they may opt to rent server in clouds. With this process of outsourcing, companies can reduce payroll costs and ensure that they remain up to date with the latest technological advances.

 

This need of outsource has created the requirement of hyperscale data center, which can operate, analyse and model the massive amounts of data flowing through their systems and offer insights into user behaviour that can be used to generate further income streams. As traditional architectures are not suited to adapt to new cloud centric infrastructure and operations, outsourcing Hyperscale represents a lot of advantages. Companies can benefit from a flexible and customizable IT infrastructure at exactly the level of traceability and cost, adapted to their capacity and need for specific workloads. The principle is simple: The low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) comes from the fact that the data centers are usually equipped with standard and thus inexpensive standard components and second, that due to virtual infrastructures for larger data volume no more space, air conditioning or electricity is needed.

 

However, companies must not only work with one a single vendor. Using cloud services from more than one hyperscaler avoids dependency on a single vendor. Connecting with different Hyperscaler companies can also choose, depending on the requirements, the individually matching cloud service. This keeps them flexible in order to respond quickly and cost-effectively to new business challenges. This approach requires well-thought-out architectures, as in addition to disk space and computing capacity, data traffic also costs money in the cloud. Unnecessary and duplicate data exchange with Second Source can also increase costs.

But where exactly are the differences in the hyperscalers? Well, the pitfalls lie in the different cloudstack. The most important distinguishing features can be divided into three categories: product diversity, performance classes and workload-specific target groups.

As no company is the same, sometimes performance, sometimes security, sometimes compliance, then again the availability or the costs or criteria such as scalability, connectivity and other workloads have priority. This question must respond to each companie’s need individually in the selection of hyperscaler.

 

Both in strategy and in purchasing, new thinking is required. Because the potential of the Hyperscaler can only be raised if the companies say goodbye to their single sourcing strategy. Multi-cloud sourcing strategies imply that businesses can move from one provider to another at any time and even distribute the same workloads among multiple resources.

 

Public cloud services are now demanded not only by large but also by medium-sized companies as a managed service. Hybrid and multi-cloud models, which constantly analyze new services and integrate them into managed service offerings, dominate.

For the path of the public cloud transformation, the supporting service providers have to offer a wide range of services and technical implementation. They act as partners of the large public cloud providers and have to know their advantages and disadvantages and advise their customers accordingly. Service Providers need to know all the offerings of the cloud providers in detail and to harmonize them with the requirements and business processes of the user companies.

 

Hyperscale computing is highly decisive choice for organizations dealing with large data volume, so the usage of the new computing system will be seen more in the area where companies demand big analytical needs.Since hyperscale computing is attracting more users, legacy methods of data management are no longer enough to meet the data management needs due to explosive data growth. HyperScale Technology provides a modern data management that is scalable, highly resilient, and simple. It allows organizations to manage data seamlessly on-premises and in the cloud. With Hyperscale Technology solutions companies can removes the burden of day-to-day operations with a simplified installation, automated and self-service operations, and update process.

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