by Rebeca | Nov 17, 2021 | cybersecurity, Resources, soffid
The deeper we foray into the Internet Age, the more organizations turn to AI to raise our productivity, improve sales, or enhance our experiences. Now, they are also turning to it to shore up their defenses against the crime that inevitably follows.
As traditional company barriers broke down, and remote working became the norm, the threat landscape rapidly changed, bringing cybersecurity to centre stage for every digital organisation.
To be resilient in this hybrid working paradigm, businesses need to react to this evolved landscape as threats continue to grow both in size and complexity. Threats now exist both from within and externally, from individuals, cybercrime organisations and even nation states. The existing norms of securing organisational IT will not stand to test in this new reality. Enter cybersecurity solutions infused with artificial intelligence, powered by the cloud.
Enterprises that employed “business composability” were more likely to succeed during the volatility caused by the pandemic, according to Gartner. That volatility is here to stay, so now is the time to get ready for it.
Nearly two years after a massive disruption hit enterprises, a few lessons are evident. Some organizations quickly adapted to the circumstances, recognized the opportunities available, and acted to capitalize on them. Other organizations were caught unprepared for the unexpected and struggled to keep going. Some of them shut down.
What separated the successful organizations from the organizations that subsisted or didn’t make it at all? One factor might be what Gartner is calling “business composability,” or “the mindset, technologies, and a set of operating capabilities that enable organizations to innovate and adapt quickly to changing business needs.” This composability was a major theme at the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo Americas, and Gartner is promoting the concept of business composability as the way for businesses to thrive through disruption in 2022 and beyond.
“Business composability is an antidote to volatility,” says Monika Sinha, research VP at Gartner,. “Sixty-three percent of CIOs at organizations with high composability reported superior business performance, compared with peers or competitors in the past year. They are better able to pursue new value streams through technology, too.”
Sinha compares the concept of composability to the way toy Legos work. She told InformationWeek in an interview that composability is about creating flexible and adaptive organizations with departments that can be re-arranged to create new value streams. She says organizations should target the following three domains of business composability:
1. Composable thinking
“This is the ability to be dynamic in your thinking as an organization,” Sinha says. This kind of thinking recognizes that business conditions often change, and it empowers the teams closest to the action to respond to the new conditions. “Traditional business thinking views change as a risk, while composable thinking is the means to master the risk of accelerating change and to create new business value.”
2. Composable business architecture
This is the ability of organizations to create dynamic ways of working, Sinha says. For instance, during the pandemic, some retailers were able to pivot quickly to providing curbside pickup, and some healthcare providers pivoted to providing telehealth appointments.
“Organizations looked at different types of models in terms of delivery,” she says. “In these types of organizations, it is really about creating ‘agile’ at scale, and agile types of working in the organization.”
Sinha notes that digital business initiatives fail when business leaders commission projects from IT and then shirk accountability for the implementation of results, treating it as another IT project. “High-composability enterprises embrace distributed accountability for digital outcomes, reflecting a shift that most CIOs have been trying to make for several years, as well as create multidisciplinary teams that blend business and IT units to drive business results,” Sinha says.
3. Composable technology
This is the IT architecture or technology stack, says Sinha. Technology is a catalyst for business transformation and thinking, and developing a flexible and modular technology architecture enables bringing together the parts needed to support transformation.
Distributed cloud and artificial intelligence are the two main technologies that a majority of high-composability enterprises have already deployed or plan to deploy in 2022, according to Gartner’s CIO Agenda survey. Gartner notes that these technologies are a catalyst for business composability because they enable modular technology capabilities.
Tech investments for 2022
Another major technology at the top of the list of planned investments for 2022 is cyber and information security, with 66% of respondents saying they expect to increase associated investments in the next year.
“Many organizations were dabbling with composability before the pandemic,” Sinha says. “What we saw was that those that were composable came out ahead after the pandemic. The pandemic highlighted the importance and the value of composability.”
Now, as many organizations look to find what is the “new normal,” it’s important to understand that there may not actually be one.
“This type of volatility is here to stay,” Sinha said. With IT budgets higher than they’ve been in the past 10 years, according to Gartner, now is the time to “leverage technology as a catalyst for creating more composable businesses.”
Sources:
(1) Informationweek
(2) technologyrecord.com
(3) Business Insider
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by Rebeca | Nov 10, 2021 | soffid
Managing identities and access entitlements is becoming increasingly challenging in a rapidly changing business, regulatory and IT environment, but those challenges are compounded for multinational organisations due to the distributed nature of their operations.
Identity and access management (IAM) is especially challenging for multinational companies that need to manage the identities of employees, partners, customers, consumers and devices wherever the company does business, while also complying with a range of data security and privacy regulations.
The domain of Identity and Access Management (IAM) has evolved over the past two decades. In the beginning, its primary purpose was to meet simple authentication requirements. As the adoption of IAM solutions increased across multiple industries, the need to meet several other requirements became apparent: service password management, single sign-on, multifactor authentication, entitlements, role engineering, authorization, life cycle management, access certification and more.
The accelerated shift to work-from-home due to the pandemic also means that SMBs are now more prone to cyberattacks, and the solutions that cater to organizations of all sizes are scant. The landscape of IAM is only becoming more convoluted and straying further away from simple and holistic security.
Converged IAM is one solution to this predicament. An IAM product that converges full suite of access management, authentication, authorization, IGA, PAM and risk analytics solutions in one platform can empower organizations to mature their overall security posture quickly, support identification of indicators of compromises (IOC) proactively and strengthen external as well as internal security maturity. It can also increase employee productivity with daily application usage, password management, single sign-on, access requests, approvals, reviews and more.
The future of IAM is not in fragments of different niches stitched together to cover various functionalities. It is in providing a single platform to meet all the IAM demands of today’s digital landscape that is constantly being encroached by threat actors.
Within the broader IAM challenge, there are several other specific challenges facing multinational organisations, often related to the fact that IAM is run differently in each region or location where the company operates. These specific challenges include:
- Being able to deal with customers and employees with identities originally registered in one geography using their identities to access services and systems in another geography.
- Delivering IAM services using different IAM technology stacks, processes, operating models and maturity levels across different company locations.
- Supporting different languages in the different countries where the company operates.
- Ensuring fast time to market for products and services requiring consistent IAM for employees, partners and customers in response to market needs and opportunities.
- Enabling fast, simultaneous rollouts for new applications to new markets.
- Standardisation and automation to reduce costs and risk of in-house solutions.
- Built-in support for the internet of things (IoT), DevOps models and local DevOps teams.
- Retaining control of infrastructure, changes, deployments and interfaces.
- Complying with specific regional and local regulatory requirements in addition to global regulatory requirements in terms of data protection, information security, product safety and quality assurance, export regulation and financial regulation.
Identity and access management is a very common element to regulations, with each type of regulation often setting some requirements for managing IDs, onboarding, identification of customers, authentication, access control and access governance.
To deal with these regulations, multinational companies need a strong IAM that is flexible enough to be strong in some regions, but more relaxed in others.
Identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) solutions have appeared on the market in recent years, in line with the as-a-service trend. These IDaaS solutions offer several key benefits that could help multinational organisations to tackle the challenge of running a global IAM service.
Since first appearing on the market, IDaaS offerings have gradually matured to include identity management, entitlement management, authentication and authorisation, which are the key components of IAM, adding the depth required by modern enterprises to reduce security and compliance risk.
The IDaaS market has registered significant growth in the past few years because of the ability of IDaaS to enable organisations to:
- Achieve better time-to-value proposition over on-premise IAM deployments.
- Extend IAM capabilities to meet the security requirements of growing software as a service (SaaS).
- Adopt global IAM standards and practices with access to industry expertise.
- Reduce internal IAM costs and efforts to keep up with the market trends.
- Limit internal IAM failures in project delivery and ongoing operations.
The shift of business workloads to the cloud, however, is a long-term journey for most businesses. Similarly, the shift from on-premise IAM to IDaaS services, while at the same time delivering comprehensive support for IAM capabilities across all target systems, regardless of their deployment model, is also a multi-step journey.
Sources:
(1) Computerweekly
(2) Forbes
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by Rebeca | Oct 14, 2021 | cybersecurity, Definitions, News, Resources, soffid
Cyber security has always been an unsought goods like, insurance, which is useful only when something bad happens. And It’s always been challenging for security leaders to communicate the value of cybersecurity investments to board and peers. Furthermore, everyone in an organization has their own perspective when it comes to cyber security. That’s partly why security professionals find it difficult to convince management for budget approval.
The value of cybersecurity should be crystal clear to life sciences and health care boards and leadership. Cybersecurity attacks and data breaches seem to be in the headlines almost daily, and sobering statistics are everywhere.
Security leaders are faced with placing a value on things that haven’t even happened, like data breaches, service disruptions and loss of customers. They need to justify security investment and acquire budget to protect organizations from the growing list of threats that could impact the future of the business.
Then there’s the problem of speaking a different language. Cybersecurity metrics are often communicated in complex, technical language that is difficult for the CEO or other business functions to understand. But translating cyber risk into business risk has never been more important, as many organizations face significant budget cuts amid COVID-19.
A comprehensive cybersecurity program is a business-critical function. With three tips, CIOs and CISOs can better communicate cybersecurity ROI by stressing why these programs are a must-have for their organizations, demonstrating the business value of security solutions and building a strong security culture.
Cybersecurity should not be treated as a siloed department, but rather an integrated part of overall business functions. One way to communicate the far-reaching value of a cybersecurity strategy is to walk leadership through the consequences of a data breach — loss of customers, data, revenue, intellectual property and more — as these consequences directly affect a business’s bottom line. By connecting the dots for non-IT executives, they’ll be able to better acknowledge the importance of strong security practices.
Create a Positive Security Culture
Engaging the whole organization to help them understand the value of a cybersecurity program is not easy. Technical risks are often difficult to translate across departments. Meanwhile, policies and procedures that ensure good security habits can be seen as an impediment to employee productivity.
This is why a positive security culture is so important. By using techniques like gamification, positive reinforcement, or interactive content like videos and podcasts to promote security practices, CISOs can engage fellow employees and get more buy-in from executives. These strategies help everyone, regardless of department or level of seniority, understand the risks and responsibilities regarding security and how each employee plays a crucial role.
One major benefit of a positive security culture is that it creates in-house evangelists who can demonstrate the value of cybersecurity. It will also empower security-aware employees to become the organization’s greatest cybersecurity asset. Simple human error causes the majority of security breaches. Getting employees invested in security contributes to overall data protection and cybersecurity objectives.
Ultimately, communicating the value of cybersecurity depends on translating cyber risk into business risk, and making security a guiding principle for your larger organization. With risks and challenges related to remote working becoming the new normal for many organizations, it’s critical that IT leaders engage all employees in shared cybersecurity awareness.
Situations are changing, as boards and management are understanding the importance of security. Now it’s the security leader’s responsibility to communicate the importance of cyber security effectively. This has become very important during the pandemic when huge risks of cyber breaches are looming and organizations cut costs due to slowing business to survive the pandemic.
Communicating the value (and necessity) of cybersecurity measures to your larger organization isn’t easy. Not only are technical risks hard to translate across departments, but policies and procedures can often be seen as a hindrance to employee productivity.
But, if you can engage with the larger organization and create a positive security culture, you’ll have a better chance of getting buy-in from C-level executives. How?
More and more, CISOs are relying on gamification, positive reinforcement, and interactive content like videos and podcasts to promote their strategies. Whatever the method or medium, the most important thing is that risks and responsibilities – which the entire organization bears the burden of – are communicated so that everyone, regardless of department or level of seniority, can understand.
The benefits of this are two-fold. Not only will you demonstrate the value of cybersecurity via in-house evangelists, but you’ll also empower security-aware employees to become your biggest cybersecurity asset.
Resources:
(1) Gartner
(2) KPMG
(3) security Tech
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by Rebeca | Oct 13, 2021 | cybersecurity, soffid
The COVID pandemic has disrupted many industries and has fueled the growth of others. According to the Flexera 2021 State of the Cloud report, 90% of companies surveyed are increasing their cloud usage due to the pandemic and the resultant digital shift.
Updated infrastructure
Over the last few years, the number of cyberattacks has increased because hackers have access to better tools and are more tech-savvy than the average employee.
To some extent, this increase in data breaches is also due to the organization’s outdated infrastructure. From an organization’s standpoint, it’s too expensive and infeasible to upgrade their network infrastructure once every few years to make it more secure. This is often seen as one of the biggest reasons for the growing increase in hacking incidents.
Meets compliance
Compliance with statutory regulations and standards is one of the biggest challenges today. In addition to meeting security standards, organizations have to meet stringent laws related to data privacy, ensure transparent data practices, and allow users to stay on top of how their data is used.
Organizations find it increasingly hard to meet these stringent compliance regulations with their in-house IAM solutions. Soffid, on the other hand, helps organizations to comply with these regulations through its features. Our intelligent analytics continuously monitor for and identify new access risks while providing native connectors with GRC solutions so risk managers can create holistic enterprise risk management strategies.
Easy to use
Soffid is not just for security. A simple and quick registration process on customer-facing applications will boost the conversion rates for organizations as more customers would be forthcoming to the idea of a secure login to access the organization’s services. Further, a single sign-on across all the organization’s resources is sure to add to a user’s convenience.
Custom solutions
We can customize our platform to meet an organization’s specific requirements as it supports different identity managements. Further, it can be designed separately for employees and external customers or as a unified IAM solution, depending on the organization’s needs.
Ease of use
Your customers and employees must find it easy to use Soffid solution. This usability is critical for adoption and to reduce the number of helpdesk calls and the resultant workload on your IT team. Consider your employees’ and customers’ demographics while deciding on an identity solution and aim to enhance the overall user experience. Consider your future prospects and their demographics as well.
Meets your compliance standards
Every industry has to adhere to a specific set of compliance standards, so make sure you know what these standards are and how Soffid can comply with them. Thus, these are some of the factors to consider.
Why IDaas has become a pandemic tool
It offers many benefits such as better security, a good user experience, compliance with industry standards, and more.
Shall we talk?
Sources:
(1) Security Itelligence
(2) CSO Online
(3) techgenix
by Rebeca | Oct 6, 2021 | cybersecurity, soffid
Pre-COVID-19, private and public organizations were on a journey towards a digital business model, travelling at varying speeds. But the scale of the pandemic has forced a dramatic acceleration, both in the speed of change and the required investment in digital transformation.
According to KPMG’s 2020 global survey, organizations are investing heavily in technology to address immediate concerns like falling revenue and interrupted supply chains, and to build longer-term competitiveness and resilience.
t’s a struggle to find many positives about the current coronavirus pandemic, however there are a few interesting aspects that are starting to emerge. Trends that may well bring significant positive benefits as their full impact is felt in the months and years to come. One of these is the likely acceleration of digital transformation projects.
Cyber security and IT operational challenges, cost pressures, risk aversion and the skills gap are all driving the digital transformation agenda. On the plus side, benefits such as innovation and improvement of products and services, efficiency and an uptick in organizational agility are all expected outcomes.
Why Will COVID-19 Accelerate The Pace Of Change?
As vast swathes of the workforce shift to remote working and pressure increases to enable digital delivery of products and services traditionally rooted outside the online space, the pressure to be a truly digital organization will only increase. Organizations of all shapes and sizes will face renewed commercial pressure to negate the downsides through digital transformation and realize the benefits it offers in order to remain viable.
We are in a time where COVID-19 has transformed the future of business forever. Organizations from all sectors globally have been focusing on transforming digitally to ensure that the needs of their organization, customers, citizens, patients, and greater stakeholder community are met. The move from physical and on-premises to digital was critical to ensure organizations’ survival through COVID-19, as well as setting an example for potential challenges that may occur in the future.
There are very few industries unimpacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, retail is an industry that has seen Digital Transformation skyrocket. With the breakneck pace of change required for retailers to compete for business online further compounded by the influx of bricks-and-mortar businesses to e-commerce due to global restrictions and lockdowns, full-scale Digital Transformation very quickly became inevitable.
All this is to say that the conversations in business have shifted rapidly over the past year to a unanimous understanding that digitization of services in addition to industry disruption due to rapid advancements in the technologies available to businesses are now changing the shape of commerce forever. Businesses that want to keep up, or survive in reality, will need to transform radically – not just digitally, but in mindset too.
A McKinsey report argues that “Now is the time to reassess digital initiatives”. The current pandemic is forcing the hand of many to adapt to survive. Never has the phrase, ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ been more relatable.
Over the last few months, the way we interact with services has changed. Many of us are now fully ‘remote’—not only are we working from home, but also learning, shopping, exercising, and other day to day activities.
We’ve all had to adjust. But for companies in particular, it’s raising questions about how to maintain business continuity. Unable to conduct business as normal, many have turned to alternative solutions and business models. Restaurants have started providing food deliveries, gyms are offering virtual classes and even hairdressers are offering tutorials online to help people cut their own hair.
These alternative solutions will likely require some form of digital innovation or optimization. In some cases, it’s fast-forwarding digitization processes that businesses were already exploring, and in others, it’s bringing to light new ones which hadn’t been considered.
What does this mean for a post-Covid world?
With many businesses turning to alternative digital solutions now more than ever before, will there be no going back once the Covid pandemic has passed?
If digital solutions are more convenient, offer a better user experience, and are more scalable for businesses, why would we then revert to time-consuming, inefficient manual or face to face processes? Are we seeing a glimpse into the future, where digital processes dramatically improve the way businesses function, and the way they serve customers?
We’re familiar with new tech start-ups, for example challenger banks, using digital processes to their advantage. But we may see more digital processes taken up by traditional services, such as mainstream banks, hotel check-ins, voting and car rentals.
One thing to keep in mind with digital transformation however, is that as it develops, we risk widening the gap between those who turn to digital options and those who don’t. Not only could this impact businesses, but we must also consider customers who might find it more difficult to use digital alternatives, for example older generations.
However, if done right, digital transformation could help secure the future of many companies. The pandemic has highlighted the fact that businesses around the world need to become more flexible and more digital. And that through doing so, it could ensure that they emerge from the Covid pandemic stronger than they were beforehand.
Sources:
(1) KPMG
(2) Deloitte
(3) CioInsight
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