As enterprises move towards new technologies to minimize costs and optimize resources, they face increased security risks as cyber-criminals adopt new techniques to target BYOD devices, corporate networks, backend servers and more. As a result, it has become crucial for stakeholders to understand how to balance the security management landscape with enterprise operations. In this week’s blog, we’ll explore the importance of enterprise security management and its ever evolving role.
The average modern workplace is faced with an unprecedented number of malicious threats. Across cyberspace, crime runs rampant, with countless digital identities being stolen every day and company servers being breached all around the world.
According to CIO Insight, the wide range of businesses that fall into the clutches of hackers every day demonstrates that no entity is truly safe from a potential attack. Still, many IT administrators continue to treat virtual security with a peculiar lack of urgency. This is likely due to the fact that malware threats aren’t “visible” like, say, a new addition to the company’s office space would be.
Organizations need to place more focus on enterprise security management (ESM) to create a security management framework so that they can create and sustain security for their critical infrastructure. Enterprise security management is a comprehensive approach to integrating guidelines, policies and proactive measures for various cyber threats.
ESM pertains to all risks that may affect the core business of an organization. It includes failed software processes, inadvertent or deliberate mistakes committed by staff members, internal security threats and external security threats.
Entrust recently detailed the three reasons for why an ESM is more important now than ever:
- Cybercriminals operate with enormous power.
Cybercriminals operate with a measure of power that is unthinkable to most people. Oftentimes this includes, unfortunately, many enterprise administrators, who critically underestimate the cohesion and sophistication of the virtual crime network.
- Hundreds of millions of records are compromised every year.
According to CSO, 176 million individual records were compromised in the first three months of 2014 alone, representing a 46 percent increase of that same figure from the previous year.
- Virtual workplace means the virtualizing of enterprise identity.
Among businesses across industrial sectors, there is a general move toward increased virtualization, yet this shift has not been accompanied by commensurate security changes.
Remember, with a large amount of data being collected from various data points in your organization, an ESM solution can handle large amounts of data to look for trends that could indicate a weakness in your infrastructure that need to be corrected. The solution looks at the critical applications that your business is dependent on and checks for any abnormal activity to detect and prevent unauthorized activity. As we’ve detailed above with the various existing cybersecurity threats, an ESM solution is absolutely essential for any size organization.
