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Corporate Passwordless Authentication: Issues to address before getting onboard

With remote work, security breaches are gaining increased attraction, with passwords being the root of the problem, leading to massive financial damage and a loss of image for the companies concerned. According to the Verizon 2021 Data Breach Investigations Report, credentials are the primary means by which a bad actor hacks into an organization, with 61 percent of breaches attributed to leveraged credentials. passwords with privileged access to organizational systems and networks are targets for hackers since they’re able to get so much information from just one singular source.

Corporate Passwordless Authentication Issues to address before getting onboard

These numbers make you sit up and take notice and are one of the reasons why many companies are currently looking into the advantages of a secure passwordless Authentication future. Secure logins without a password not only bring companies cost savings and smoother user logins. They also provide security as millions of employees continue to work remotely, even after the pandemic has passed.

 

One company or another may have already planned its passwordless strategy and are now ready to implement it. As many companies know, going password-free is more of a journey than a destination. In any case, what companies can do is make sure they don’t hit any deep potholes so that this journey runs as smoothly as possible.

The journey towards a passwordless strategy is different for every company. For example, organizations could implement a passwordless smart card approach, a passwordless FIDO2/WebAuthn approach, or even a hybrid approach that combines both approaches to meet diverse business needs. But no matter which path companies take, there are some common pitfalls that can be avoided if they are known.

 

  • When it comes to implementations, a passwordless solution can involve multiple products installed at various times for different user levels. The journey towards passa wordless future isn’t always swift. Some obstacles may appear along the way. So, companies can’t necessarily see the entire route, but they can be prepared for whatever awaits them beyond the potential obstacle. Specifically, companies should start embarking with the most sensitive, important, and critical use cases and user groups and then gradually expand the passwordless implementation.
  • Passwordless is not just an IT implementation. Since it can significantly change the corporate culture and processes, every department within the company must be included. If the roadmap is narrow or created by only one department, the likelihood of it failing once it must be communicated to users, HR, and senior management increases. The key to success is taking an integrated approach and involving all key stakeholders from the start to achieve maximum user adoption. This is exactly what improves the security level of the entire company.
  • When technical teams lead a project, communication with users and user training are often forgotten. The communications or training team must plan live or virtual events, build positive expectations and make the innovative solutions and processes easier to understand for the rest of the employees.
  • IT teams must verify at the earliest stage that the planned passwordless implementation will work as expected across all key systems, use cases, and users. It’s logical to set up a test environment that demonstrates the end-to-end connectivity between the existing systems and the authentication technology for the most important users/user groups and check whether their defined success criteria can be met.

 

Conclusion

Since using passwords incorrectly often represents an enormous security risk, more and more companies are looking for alternatives and would like to make passwordless login the standard. It is important to know that this change cannot and should not happen overnight – it is also important to choose a holistic, well-founded path, because only then does the change really bring the maximum IT security. If companies are aware of some common switching pitfalls and consciously avoid them, they will be well on their way to a future without passwords.

 

Source : 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report

Effective methods to avoid Data loss and Data leakage

In the age of digitization and technological developments such as Industry 4.0, companies are confronted with ever-increasing amounts of data that need to be stored, analyzed, and evaluated according to business activity/priorities. Even though data is playing an increasingly significant role as a resource, it also comes along with huge security challenges. It is becoming increasingly lucrative for hackers to steal data to use it for a competitive advantage or even to monetize stolen data. When the data is stolen, companies lose a lot of money. To counteract this, data security, i.e., the protection of data from unauthorized access, is of crucial importance.

 

The protection of a company’s valuable data from unauthorized access is the task of data loss prevention (DLP) tools. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions have been an integral part of the IT security strategy of many companies for more than ten years now. It is one of the most used technologies, by worldwide companies, to prevent the loss of sensitive data.  The aim is to protect any form of data against manipulation, disclosure, loss, and other forms of threats.

 

Various countermeasures can be taken to minimize the loss of a company due to data loss & to protect critical business assets. When implementing them, it is important to know what value the respective data generates for the company. Data that leads to high financial losses in the event of damage must be given the highest priority in the implementation of data loss prevention.

 

  • Backups: The most used method to counteract data loss are backups. These do not directly prevent the data loss process, but if data is lost, it can at least be recovered. Thus, it is important that the backups are carried out on a regular basis. They must also be regularly checked for recoverability and malware.

 

  • Permission Restrictions: Another technique to limit accidental data loss by employees is to restrict permissions/access to valuable files. The permission layer supports the company’s data privacy by protecting access to restricted data. Also, if an employee does not have permission to delete a file cannot delete it either.

 

  • Training and antivirus programs: There are several measures that must be taken to protect against viruses. First, the employees should be trained so that a virus has no chance of being invited into the system. However, since errors can still occur here, network anti-virus programs must be installed on every computer, every server, and every communication interface. It makes sense not to rely on just one provider here to be able to intercept several viruses.

 

  • Data leakage prevention: Analogous to data loss prevention, data must be inventoried and categorized. It ensures that users do not send sensitive or critical information outside the corporate network. Business confidential and critical information is classified and protected so that unauthorized users cannot accidentally or maliciously share data, which would put the organization at risk.

 

  • E-mail scanning: To prevent unauthorized internal sending of confidential documents, companies can prevent outgoing e-mails with attachments. However, since this cannot be practically implemented in everyday life, it makes sense to scan outgoing e-mails and only deliver them if previously set rules for sending have been observed.

 

  • Training and antivirus programs: Finally, incoming electronic communication can also be checked. This is to ensure that no Trojan or other form of malicious software can nest in the corporate network. Incoming documents in particular offer opportunities for this. Anti-virus programs must be used here to prevent a virus from being loaded. Employees also need to be trained so that fraudulent e-mails don’t stand a chance.

Data loss prevention & data leakage prevention are two main data security strategies that are adopted by worldwide companies. Companies that store sensitive and critical data, such as personal data, should place a greater focus on data leakage prevention. Operators of universally available assets, on the other hand, should consider data loss prevention as a priority.

Master Data Strategy: How to achieve greater operational efficiency and improve the customer experience?

Master Data Strategy How to achieve a greater operational efficiency and improve the customer experience

Without a doubt, the corona pandemic has led to a holistic rethinking in many areas of the company. Companies have implemented solutions that make their employees work easier, help them to reduce overall costs, and improve existing business processes and their customer’s experience in parallel. All this can’t be done without good master data. Master data is at the heart of all operational processes. Sourcing, product development, manufacturing, shipping, marketing, and sales all depend on the ability to efficiently collect, manage, and share trusted data on time.

 

Master data management also helps to automate and control error-prone manual processes, enable transparency and insights to make better operational decisions and so organizations can improve the quality of products and services, and accelerate time-to-market.

In order to achieve increased productivity, profitability, and business performance while reducing costs, one must not ignore the quality of the master data, regardless of whether it is customer master data, supplier master data, or article master data. Only superior quality data has a decisive influence on the efficiency of business processes and the quality of corporate decisions. Outdated, incorrect, or missing master data can lead to a loss of sales or weaken the reputation of the customer or supplier.

 

What mistakes can one make in master data management?

 

Management is not involved

Without the support and coordination with the management, the master data management project is doomed to failure. The support of the management right from the start is the only way to dissolve cross-departmental thinking. The senior management officer must ensure that the project team can not only streamline the management of data across departments but also that business processes and procedures can be adjusted across departments if necessary. Such huge changes are rarely received positively, so effective communication in change management is necessary.

 

Master data management is not an IT issue

Master data management is not a technical challenge or problem that only the IT department can solve. This topic must be addressed by the specialist departments. Only the various specialist departments know the content-related requirements for correct and up-to-date data. And they know their own business processes in which the various data are generated or changed. IT can help with the selection and the implementation of MDM solutions, but the specialist departments must take on the technical part here.

 

The long-term vision of the MDM project

As with any project, the MDM project also needs good management within the organization based on a correct goal matrix and a long-term vision for data management. However, this must not tempt you to create the scope of the project in such a way that it is no longer possible to carry it out quickly and efficiently. Agile project management makes it possible for achieving the goals step by step. With an unrealistic project scope, the entire project can quickly fail, and you end up with no result. Most of the time an experienced project manager, possibly external, can help get the project off the ground.

 

Organizational and cultural changes are ignored

No matter how good the project, the goals, and the vision, it will fail if all the different parties in the organization are not brought on board. Those affected and opinion leaders play a key role in the success of the project. The project team often gambles away its own success by doing everything in a quiet little room and in the end, everyone is surprised by the new solution, the result = is rejection. Good change management communication to the affected groups is an essential component of building awareness and support for organizational change and achieving long-term success.

 

The goal of mastering data management is the optimization, improvement, and long-term protection of data quality and data consistency. The main problem is when the master data is stored redundantly in different databases. This leads to time-consuming and costly data comparisons or the introduction of a central MDM system that, as a central data hub, provides the data for all other systems.

Cloud vs. On-premise: How The Cloud Operating Models can help in Covid-19 Crises

ON PERMISES VS CLOUD

The dramatic spread of COVID-19 has not only threatened lives and livelihoods but also businesses worldwide. The corona crisis has confronted companies and employees with enormous challenges and fear among staffs and other stakeholders. Organizations around the world are facing twin anxieties, for how long and how sever will the COVID19 outbreak will be and how can they prepare for a new organizational structure that can help them keep pace sustainably. In addition to technological, organizational and motivational difficulties, IT teams often had to do with the capacity limits of the solutions used.

 

The biggest challenge for organizations was to face a sudden and dramatic situation in which from one day to the next suddenly a few hundred employees were working from their home office. This rapid shift to remote work has brought on other challenges of scalability and flexibility along with effective performance measurement, management, and accountability for organizations. In this suddenly almost exclusively virtual world, a high level of scalability was required, which is more difficult or easier to achieve depending on the operating model – in your own data center or in the cloud.

 

Even before the corona crisis, it was a long debate on the “right” choice between cloud and on-premise monitoring? Several ways in which solutions can be used have occupied many decision-makers and divided their opinions. But in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, your choice might impact your company’s long-term sustainability and profitability. Here below is the overview of different operating models and the advantages they offer to organizations.

 

Overview of Operating Models: In general, software solutions are available in two modes, on-premise and cloud-based. On one hand we have “on-premise software” that are installed locally, on a company’s own computers and servers, data center whereby maintenance, safety and updates also need to be taken care by internal employees. On the other hand, we have “Cloud-based software” that are hosted on the vendor’s servers and accessed through a web browser.

Even in cloud, companies have the choice to opt for a private or public cloud. A private cloud is not shared with any other organization. The private cloud user has the cloud to themselves. By contrast, a public cloud is a cloud service that shares computing services among different customers, even though each customer’s data and applications running in the cloud remain hidden from other cloud customers.

 

Flexera™2020 State of The Cloud Report shows that 92% of organization’s IT environment is in the cloud today, as only 8% say their total IT environment is all on-premises. 93 % of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy versus 87 % have a hybrid cloud strategy. 59 % of respondents who answered a question about COVID-19 expect cloud use to exceed plans due to the pandemic.

 

According to the study, cloud top challenges are security, spend, governance and expertise. 83% of enterprises indicate that security is a challenge, followed by 82% for managing cloud spend and 79% for governance. On the other hand, for cloud beginners, lack of resources/expertise is the top challenge, for advanced cloud users, managing cloud spend is the top challenge.

 

Covid-19 Challenges: In order to stop the spread of coronavirus, the home office requirements are obliged by the federal and state governments. It’s a huge challenge for many companies because their IT infrastructure reached its capacity limits. In the event of unexpected growth, they are faced with an increasing need for storage and services. In addition to that, it’s difficult to predict when any contraction will occur. On one hand, the significantly increased access to corporate servers by home workers has led to problems with accessibility and connection quality for many. A flexible and short-term expansion of capacities was therefore required – which works differently depending on the type of company. On the other hand, in the event of shrinkage, the most important thing is to be able to scale down and keep a grip on costs. Thus, it’s a huge challenge for companies to make the storage strategy more flexible, scalable and responsive. A study conducted by LogicMonitor revels that 87% of global IT decision makers agree that the current COVID-19 pandemic will cause organizations to accelerate their migration to the cloud.

 

Both operating models have their advantage and inconvenient:

The advantages of operating on cloud (regardless of whether it is a public or a private cloud) are generally associated with reducing internal IT staff responsibilities as your cloud storage will be managed by third company. Their responsibilities will be limited when it comes to install new software patches or updates, security and maintenance, thus they can concentrate on other important tasks. In addition, they can access real-time reporting and analysis of data from anywhere, which is very crucial for home office during covid19 crises. Company’s online data is secured and encrypted and backed-up at regular intervals, with Cloud Computing, it’s all included in the package. To help companies keep their initial costs low, organizations regularly pay for cloud-storage on a monthly use basis. No matter if you’re scaling up or scaling down, cloud vendors can easily adjust their prices to meet your budget. A major downside of cloud is that you may lose access to your data in case of a connection outrage and can stop the productivity. Plus, you run the risk of unauthorized personnel accessing your data.

 

The advantages of operating an on-premise solution are generally related to the greater security and independency and full control of internal IT, that on-premises solutions and storage give their data.  As that organization have the full control over their hardware’s locally, upgrades can be tightly controlled. But that also means that the company is solely responsible for the configuration, operation, maintenance and security of the data center. And also, that it has to find quick solutions for changing conditions, such as in corona times, and implement every step necessary for this in-house. This requires appropriate hardware, networks, bandwidth, know-how and time resources. One of the major benefits of on-premises storage is that it doesn’t require users to have an internet connection to access data. So, the fear of losing productivity due to connection loss is non existing.

 

Sources:


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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.

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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

Corporate Data Movement: How to Practice Good Data Security

Corporate Data Movement How to Practice Good Data Security

Data Movement refers to the transfer of files or information that can be critically important to all stakeholders in your organization: employees, suppliers and everyone you do business with. Companies are using all kinds of latest and supplicated technologies and techniques to protect their critical and valuable business assets. But, often forgotten, the most important factor, in any cybersecurity program, is trust.

 

In delivering their work rapidly and efficiently, whether it’s the marketing, sales or the finance team, employees forgets the essential data security measures if they are not trained well. In this article, we cover how business and technology leaders can ensure that their critical and valuable corporate assets remain safe and how they can teach employees to move data in safe way because if your employees don’t know how to recognize a security threat, how can they be expected to avoid it, report it or remove it? This is where IT needs to draw a line between balancing security issues and giving people the tools and accesses, they need to get their job done.

 

  • Shearing files containing corporate data via Emails

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A report on data security based on Ipswich File Transfer confidential surveys of IT professionals, revealed that a vast majority (84%) of the respondents send classified or confidential information as email attachments. Of that majority, 72% do this at least once per week, and 52% do this at least once per day. Try to imagine the quantity of data which is transferred via your email server every day with the information in between departments or with the personal information of employees. Mails with containing data of potential clients transferred from marketing to sales. As this sensitive data is transmitted via email servers with inadequate security controls. By doing it, employees are certainly putting company’s data at risk without realizing how dangerous they can be to the organization’s cybersecurity. Hackers are always looking for new ways to steal sensitive data by hacking email accounts to get the job done.

 

  • Sharing files containing corporate data via Cloud Servers

 

 As more and more companies switch to cloud or hybrid cloud environments, much more sensitive data is transferred via these cloud services such as Google Drive, Dropbox and Microsoft Azure. These clouds services are becoming more and more a regular part of any business process. The main problem while using a third-party file sharing service, corporate sensitive and confidential data is taken outside of company’s IT environment and causing a risk to the data’s privacy. Therefore, the IT department must have a sufficient overview of who has access to these services and which data is in the cloud or being transferred via cloud. The most important measure for the security of data in the cloud is who is responsible for protecting this data. It leaders must be certain that your company is well insured against breakdowns or security margins before signing any contract with cloud services. According to your own risk assessment, it may be concluded that certain types of data are better stored locally because IT there has more control over the security and compliance of this data.

 

  • FTP Servers

 

FTP is an application layer protocol used for the transfer of files between a client and server and is as old as the email and is used far more often than IT experts would like to admit. FTP is an ideal file sharing platform for small to medium-size enterprises which have basic file transfer requirements.  The problem with this method is that it is not considered as a secured protocol per today’s standards. Users don’t get the ability to encrypt and protect data as FTP has no encryption. Which leads they data in the transferred files front of a huge security risk. In addition to that, FTP has become over 45 years old and it is not suitable for high-volume transactions and multiple requirements. Therefore, companies must find better alternatives to FTP such as SFTP, HTTP, MFT.

 

Company must educate their workers about the best and safest data transfer approach and train them regularly on the pros and cons of each solution. The best way for businesses to handle this is to set a company-approved application that will demonstrate safe data-transfer. Employees whose companies provide them with a secure, easy-to-use file sync service will see no need to bring other file sharing services into the workplace. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter which solution you or your end users use. Ultimately, your company is only responsible for the sensitive data, regardless of which tools and services you use.

 

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