The inception of outsourcing started way back in the 1980’s and gradually accelerated in the 1990’s. If we dig up the history of hiring services, many organizations did not take it as a convenient facilitator of business convenience. However, in the passage of time, when the load of operational responsibilities and customer services shot up, the necessity of a ‘helping hand’ apart from in-house employees appeared prominently. It not just minimized the workload but also ensured zero interruption in the business continuity.

Due to the increasing demands in every industry, IT services started to get hired by organizations. Initially, what was just ‘IT services’, gradually it turned out to be ‘IT security services’, in the passage of time. Later on, the pattern of services got streamlined into basic cybersecurity mechanisms that got restricted to firewalls and antivirus. But what happens when organizations simply get into the habit of thrusting every work on the outsourced team?

The Nascent Stage

Lack of resources or unavailability of adequate resources necessitated the recruitment of IT staff. There was a time when the meaning of cybersecurity was installing anti-virus software and having firewalls. The organized cyber criminal groups pushed organizations to go a step ahead and developed a Security Operations Center (SOC). This is nothing but a dedicated platform and team that works round the clock to identify, assess, and prevent any cyberattack. However, organizations used to think that SOC is required only in datacenters that were the prime targets of all major IT security threats. 

Further Development

An organization’s entire IT security infrastructure goes for a toss once the entire security is dependent on the hired/ outsourced team. The dilemma of ‘to-be-or-not-to-be’ forced many organizations to do an unusual delay over building up the IT security ecosystem in their organization. Even if SOC was hired, there was no apt and knowledgeable person who could monitor, manage and keep a regular eye on the ‘W’ factors: 

• What is happening? 
• Who is monitoring?
• What is being accessed?
• Why is it being accessed?
• How is it accessed?
• Who is accessing?

Gradually a million-dollar question popped in the mind of the organizations: Why shouldn’t there be a person equally alert, aware and knowledgeable to assess whether the IT infrastructure of the organization is actually secure? This gave the birth of a CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) and a CTO (Chief Technology Officer). As the pattern of cyber threats turned sophisticated, the required knowledge to prevent threats and protect data assets became highly imperative. Especially, it is not possible for organizations to prevent zero-day threats if there are no reliable and dedicated insiders to manage, control and monitor zero day threats. This initiated the idea of an in-house IT security team (headed by CISO/ CTO/ CIO) even if there is a separate outsourced team. 

Current Scenario

Truly speaking, the evolution of outsourced cyber security is the fastest one the world has ever seen. Many organizations lack the capacity to ensure robust security in the vast and distributed environment. Due to adoption of advanced technologies, the threat patterns are also changing drastically. Many times, organizations lack the role of the key IT security persons who can do continuous R&D to initiate new strategies to stop anomalous activities in the enterprise network periphery. So, they count on service providers to get the job done.

Moreover, if the organization has multiple privileged environments, then IT security is highly imperative, else non-compliance charges might get applied. Privileged accounts are the gateways to confidential business information and thus there is no alternative to secure the environment. But are the organizations completely safe once they outsource IT security team? What are the advantages and disadvantages of hiring an IT security service provider?

Conclusion

Cyber-attacks, insider threats and third-party threats to confidential data remain one of the topmost concerns for IT security and risk management teams. In the last couple of years, adoption of hybrid models has necessitated more and more usage of outsourced IT security service/ solution providers. Managing on-prem IT security and remote security at the same time is a common challenge for organizations. Outsourcing the relevant IT security service provider can surely overcome the challenge provided the risk factors, as mentioned above, are taken care of. 

“Agility is the ability to adapt and respond to change… agile organizations view change as an opportunity, not threat.”

 -Jim Highsmith, software engineer and author of ‘Adaptive Software Development’

The flexibility, control and responsiveness of IT operations determine how agile an organization is. IT agility is about optimizing the flow of creating value for the customer services with the available resources in zero interference. In the age of massive IT automation, organizations always face the challenge of managing thousands of end-users and their activities that ensure uninterrupted IT processes. Each and every whereabouts of the tasks and responsibilities demand intense and real-time monitoring so that IT agility is ensured. At the same time, if necessary demands and key approvals are made amid robust IT security, then the organization can be said to be ‘agile’.

How can IT Agility take a hit?

In the era of digitalization, organizations prioritize IT security policies and ensure how strictly they are followed by the end-users. The seriousness of the situation intensified during the pandemic and even in the post-pandemic time. In the last couple of years, many organizations suffered unusual, unexpected and IT operational setbacks, and thus, IT agility got a hit. With most of the critical accesses happening remotely, timely permissions and necessary denials play a crucial role to ensure security and flexibility among the organizations’ workforce.

Today hybrid work models are adopted by global organizations to stay afloat with the demanding trends. The flexibility of the entire workforce who prioritize, control and monitor the elevated and privileged activities builds up the foundation of IT agility. Excessive delay in the IT administrative tasks affects organizations in terms of smooth IT processes even if the IT security infrastructure is robust enough. It could even affect the service quality followed by slow access and unwanted delay in services.

To be precise, IT efficiency is directly proportional to IT security in any vast IT ecosystem. And if organizations are efficient enough to manage every day-to-day task with zero intervention, then we can say that the organization is agile enough to withstand cyber threats.

What about IT agility in Privileged environment?

In case of the privileged environment in an organization, IT agility ensures that all the privileged activities are happening smoothly with no hindrance. As privileged identities are the gateways to confidential business information, any organization would definitely ensure end-to-end security for all privileged activities. However, at the same time, what about the efficiency of the IT processes? Can we consider an organization agile if the approvals for elevated rights take a long time, privileged sessions are delayed due to too many privileged users, or even managing requests from one desk to the other manually? 

Let’s see how ARCON’s Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution ensures IT agility of an organization.

Role of ARCON | Privileged Access Management (PAM)

ARCON | Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution, in this backdrop, not just ensures secured access in the enterprise network, but also helps IT administrators to accomplish their tasks efficiently and on time. The flexibility of the overall business process and reliability of the stakeholders determine the extent of IT agility the organization is having. Here are some robust features of PAM solution that can help organizations to maintain agility simultaneously with protecting confidential business data assets.

Single Sign-On: In a vast IT environment, where there are multiple system administrators, maintaining efficiency is a real challenge because multiple system admins mean multiple user IDs, multiple access credentials and multiple approval procedures. Single Sign-On helps admins to overcome the challenge of managing multiple accounts by automating the access rights without the necessity to remember multiple user IDs and passwords.

User OnBoarding: It is always necessary for the IT administrators to ensure ease of offering permissions while adding new user accounts and servers groups with associated privileges. It helps administrators to provision or deprovision users by interacting with the active directory. With PAM, organizations can ensure all information on boarded stays confidential and secure.

Auto-Discovery: Identifying and tracking ownership of privileges is a real challenge for the IT Security team. With this, the IT risk management team records the details of all shared accounts and service accounts and thereby mitigates the risk of unrecorded access.

One Admin Control: In a vast IT environment, every access to the critical systems needs to happen through one admin console. All these rule and role-based access in the IT environment happens only on a ‘need-to-know’ and ‘need-to-do’ basis.  

Workflow Management: Enterprise IT agility is ensured if the administration job is prompt and hasslefree. This PAM feature automates the approval process of privileged users, user groups and service groups. In case of manual approvals, it remains time-consuming and tedious, hence Workflow Management enhances efficiency. 

AD Bridging: Different operating systems in a single network periphery could be highly challenging for the IT administrators. ARCON’s PAM solution allows organizations to use Microsoft Active Directory as the authoritative source of identity. It accepts both privileged and non-privileged accounts from non-Windows machines (eg. Linux, Unix).

Desk Insight: Attending requests from one desk to another is a real challenge for IT administrators in a vast IT environment. In order to make it efficient, this feature helps them to manage requests from one desk to another by troubleshooting a machine without moving. It even helps to allow admin rights, define a set of tasks, manage passwords etc. 

Robotic Process Automation: Who likes to do regular mundane IT tasks? The Robotic Process Automation (RPA) automates these tasks with ease, efficiency and accuracy. It also offers to customize steps for the end-users for any SSO activity. 

Conclusion

Once organizations ensure both the security and efficiency in the IT environment, IT agility is restored with zero intervention. It maintains flexibility and offers a different edge to the responsiveness of the organization. Above all, it helps to meet the requirements of the compliance standards and thereby maintains business continuity.

If we look a couple of years back, the concept of Work From Home (WFH) was limited to freelancers and a few working professionals. Over the passage of time, the sudden pandemic brought massive changes in the  enterprise work culture. Due to biological security, many organizations asked their employees to stay at home and thus Work From Home (WFH) became a familiar term for full-time working professionals. 

Situations have improved and now employees are back to the office gradually. However, there has been hybridization between ‘working from home’ and ‘working from office’. According to exclusive and latest CNBC research, over 70% of global employees are presently working remotely at least once a week. As a result, organizations are modifying their IT infrastructure so that flexibility of location cannot create any hindrance among the workforce. This has given birth to a new model – Work From Anywhere (WFA).

Some Challenges

The top three objectives of any business organization (both MNC & SME) are: 

• Return on Investment (ROI)
• Higher Revenue
• Business Continuity

To ensure all the above in WFA conditions, organizations are revamping their IT environment, IT security policies, access management of critical data repositories and increasing the frequency of IT audits. Many organizations have considered this necessity as a challenge and banked on third-party service providers to ensure that there is no interruption in the business amid the pandemic. 

However, the circumference of IT risk expanded beyond assessment. Numerous threats have arised at the infrastructure level and hence, organizations necessitated the security of distributed workforce in multiple locations. Among all, the maximum risks lie with the ever-expanding number of privileged identities in the IT network periphery. In both remote and on-prem conditions, privileged accounts are the most vulnerable areas when it comes to data breach threats. Unrecognized third parties, external IT staff, and consultants break through privileged access, intrude on the privacy and compromise confidential business information and misuse it. The dominant threats in WFA conditions are majorly due to:

• Poor or inadequate access control policies that lead to ambiguity in all the accesses happening in the enterprise IT environment. Malicious actors reap the benefits of this vulnerability and compromise privileged accounts.
• Absence or inadequate end-user validation mechanism like multi-factor authentication fails to segregate authorized and genuine users from the suspicious ones who are accessing critical systems in the enterprise network time and again.
• Employees access business-critical applications and systems every day with ‘always-on’ privileges. Risks multiply if there is the absence of an access control framework based only on ‘need-to-know’ and ‘need-to-do’ policies. 

Best Solutions

Protecting data is always the top priority for any enterprise. While adequate security controls are a must round the clock, they are even more important as employees are working in hybrid work conditions. Thus, the challenge of safeguarding enterprise data has intensified. Apart from the basic IT security cautiousness as expected from the workforce, organizations always prefer an all-in-one solution that could address all the WFA challenges under one roof. 

ARCON being a global brand offers best-in-class and feature-rich Privileged Access Management (PAM) and Identity Access Management (IAM) solutions for both remote and on-prem conditions. The access control risks intensify if hundreds of privileged users access the critical databases, systems or applications at different hours for different purposes. Starting from user authorization, elevated access authentication, password vaulting, maintaining workflow matrix, monitoring every privileged session and robust identity governance, ARCON ensures that it safeguards the organizations’ IT landscape from prevailing cyber threats with the robust features of the solutions. Here is a brief overview of the necessary and relevant ones:

Conclusion

According to The Economic Times, almost 64% of organizations from IT, Telecom, Financial services, Utilities sector have agreed upon workplace flexibility policy worldwide. The pandemic is not yet over and thus organizations are not taking chances with their business continuity. Work From Anywhere (WFA) policy has indirectly upgraded organizations’ IT infrastructure to the next level so that business operations remain unaffected in any given situation. After all, it’s better to be safe than sorry!

Business alliances and partnerships are key growth enablers for both large organizations and SMBs. The main purpose of a business alliance is to achieve the desired financial goals by sharing operational responsibilities that are mutually and easily doable. 

Many organizations even go for alliances to fulfill the gaps in their business process with the help of their partners. It not only brings efficiency gains but also boosts profitability. 

Now, to make a collaboration that brings the desired results, secure IT infrastructure plays a pivotal role. A single IT security loophole or a cyber incident cannot only affect the victim but also the alliance partner who is involved in the business collaboration with the victim. In other words, in addition to business synergies, both parties need to understand the significance of IT security measures being implemented in place. 

Why is IT security crucial in business alliances?

Although business agreements between two organizations cover the scope, objectives, requirements, and profit sharing details, crystal clear policies on data security and IT governance framework must be part of any partnership agreement.

Every organization desires a secured IT infrastructure today to ensure an uninterrupted business process. With the rising complexities of cyber security, it is highly imperative to keep in  mind the IT infra security requirements of both merging businesses for a smooth transition.  

A single breach incident cannot only cost heavily to both partnering organizations, but other business stakeholders and investors will distrust the company if they find that the data is not managed properly. 

For any partnership to prosper in today’s digital landscape, the partnering organizations have to be at par with global standards. It should start with establishing stringent IT security policies and standards. IT governance is critical to ensure sustainable business growth. 

What are the apparent IT risks?

As business-critical data flows from system to system and is shared and accessed by multiple end-users, what would happen if it lands in the hands of any suspicious third-party user or any malicious insider? What if there is cyber espionage or data exfiltration?

The answer to all these questions boils down to one and only way out:Strengthen IT security policy and mechanisms to ensure business continuity. 

For instance, a manufacturing company with large on-prem IT infrastructure collaborates for business synergies with another company with strong supply chain capabilities that has installed multiple SaaS applications.

That means, once merged, the new entity will have large hybrid IT environments, exposing it to more IT and data vulnerability. 

If the new business collaboration fails to establish robust IT governance and policies to manage and monitor end-users in hybrid environments, the threat to systems will amplify. 

Besides, suffering heavy financial losses stemming from the data breach, today’s organizations have to face a double whammy: massive financial penalties arising due to non-compliance. Adding to the woes is the loss of reputation. 

Business Alliances: Some Measures for Data Security 

Unified IT governance: Organizations do require a unified IT governance framework for better visibility. A centralized governance approach ensures authorization and audit of every IT activity even as data flows endlessly within the organization. Unified IT governance enhances end-points’ security and secures identities that continually interact with business-critical applications.

Robust Access Control: It is always advisable to have a tight access control in any IT environment. Both for on-cloud and on-prem IT infrastructure, a robust access control mechanism with multiple layers of user authentication validates the end-user. Especially for organizations where a large number of privileged users regularly access business-critical applications and systems, it is highly imperative. Moreover, when two organizations merge, role and rule-based access control helps both the organizations to segregate the users in task-based groups, which again is more secure from an IT risk perspective.

Regulatory Compliance: By building security controls that adhere to regulatory mandates, organizations can mitigate data breaches and avoid paying hefty fines for non-compliance. Several global regulations such as the EU-GDPR and IT Standards like the PCI-DSS, HIPAA, ISO 27001 etc. among many regional and Central Banks mandates explicitly mention the need to reinforce the Access Controls, Access Management, Password Rotations, Segregation of end-users based on responsibilities and frequent IT audits and reporting. 

Conclusion

Robust IT security must be at the core of any business alliance. Poor IT security planning or an IT incident will only result in higher cyber insurance premiums and eventually impact the profitability and sustainable growth – the purpose for which entities forge alliances. 

Introduction

The Cyber security landscape has changed significantly since 2020 due to the pandemic. In the wake of remote access becoming the ‘new normal, organizations encountered several IT administrative, operational and security challenges. Cyber attacks have also increased. As a result, new trends are emerging in cyber security.

Let’s have a look at some of the current trends:

• Remote access security topped the list of IT security domains (An Increasing number of inquiries and demos were centered around secure remote access in the last ten months)
• Our internal assessment shows that nearly 50% of organizations increased their budget on remote access tools
• Endpoint security, Messaging security, Identity management and Access control and Network security are likely to witness a significant increase in IT budget suggests our recent interactions with the IT CXO level
• Cyber Insurance is receiving more focus in annual corporate budgets and expected to witness a strong double-digit percentage growth

What are the causes behind these trends?

An unprecedented combination of new challenges, new threats, uncertainty and the level of cyber security preparedness– which was never designed to face current IT use-cases, have necessitated a 360 degree change. Protecting data from theft and cyber attacks has become a daunting task as end users are working remotely, and are dispersed. Authentication mechanisms, Identity governance, end-user behavior patterns are some of the critical areas that have taken the front-seat.

Likewise, the boardroom discussions are more focussed on analyzing the current IT security infrastructure and the desired IT security infrastructure. Most of the global organizations have realized the importance of allocating adequate budget to ensure secure remote IT operations round the year as it seems that the hybrid work culture is here to stay even after the pandemic becomes a history.

 In the last 10 months, ARCON has observed that organizations across the spectrum– from BFSI, Telecom, Healthcare, Manufacturing, to Government and defence organizations have started to look into the following areas more closely.

• Privileged Access Security
• Just-in-time Privileges
• End-point Security
• End-user Behavior Patterns
• Zero Trust Security Framework
• Secure Remote Access

Resultantly, a centralized governance framework, rule-based, role-based, and time-based access control to systems, Multi-factor authentication (MFA), Single-sign-on, end-user behavior monitoring and analytics around it and, access to critical systems through a secure gateway have become IT security ‘must’ for global organizations.

All the above IT practices can ensure uninterrupted and secured IT operations amid both remote and on-prem work conditions. We find that more and more organizations are gearing-up by integrating these tools in their IT infrastructure.

ARCON is a leading enterprise risk control solutions provider, specializing in risk-predictive technologies. ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics enables to monitor end-user activities in real time. ARCON | Privileged Access Management reinforces access control and mitigates data breach threats. ARCON | Secure Compliance Management is a vulnerability assessment tool.