By having a well-defined IT security policy in place, organizations can ensure that every employee follows the security framework. A comprehensive and stringent IT security policy should cover a wide range of topics, including the structure of workstations and how (and when) the employees should log in. It establishes safe IT practices. 

On the other hand, an organization’s information assets, including any intellectual property, are vulnerable to compromise if information security mechanisms are not in place. There could be various reasons behind the lack of an IT security policy, including lack of resources to assist with policy development, poor management adoption, or lack of knowledge about the necessity of an efficient IT security program in place.

Why is it required?

When designing business information security rules, it’s critical to remember the principles of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The major purpose of an IT security policy is to create the discipline of reliable IT security practices. IT security policies are intended to address security risks, execute measures to mitigate IT security vulnerabilities and specify how to recover from any cyber disaster.

As a result of the policies, employees are also advised on what they should and shouldn’t do. Having comprehensive security measures has several advantages for the organization. Policies can aid in the improvement of a company’s overall security posture. There are minimal access security cases involving the organization, and employees may turn to the policies to handle them. 

Creating a robust IT security policy also helps to prepare audit reports, that ensures  compliance with regulatory standards. Additionally, it enhances user and stakeholder accountability inside an organization, important to maintain checks and balances. 

How does IT Security Policy help?

A standard and detailed IT security policy is a part of an organization’s entire governance program. It provides security technologies and processes the legitimacy and clear accountability, ownership, and transparency for auditing reasons.

For the following reasons, an information security policy is required:

• Data integrity: A well-defined policy allows organizations for a systematic approach to detect and reduce risks to data confidentiality, integrity, availability, and proper response measures in an incident.

• Reduction of IT Risk: An information security policy outlines how a company detects, analyses, and mitigates IT vulnerabilities to prevent security risks & the procedures for recovering from a system outage or data breach.

• Implement and monitor security policies across every department: A unified information security policy avoids departmental decisions that aren’t aligned to the business objectives, and those departments that don’t have any policies at all. It outlines how the company determines which technologies or processes aren’t performing useful security functions.

• Third parties and external auditors should be aware of the policy: A standard IT security policy helps organizations to explain the procedures to external auditors, contractors, third parties, business partners and of course employees and internal stakeholders.

• To aid regulatory compliance: An organization must have a well-developed and well-defined security policy to comply with the global regulations and standards such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, ISO 27001, SOX etc. Auditors frequently seek records of end-user activities, and the information security policy can assist to demonstrate who has performed which task and for what reason:
  • Examine the effectiveness of the policy in the current IT security context
  • Perform a risk assessment to identify and mitigate IT security loopholes
  • Examine the efficacy of the systems involved with overall access management

Conclusion

IT security policies play a vital role in any company’s success. The objective of security policies is not to fill up the gaps, but to ensure that no gaps are created. If security policies are not constantly updated, they might not be able to withstand the emerging threats. IT Security policies should be reviewed and revised annually and revised as and when required.

Large, small and mid-size enterprises may face serious consequences if sensitive information is made public. Apart from the financial consequences and legal wrangles due to noncompliance with regulations, business operations might be crippled due to breaches. The first step in preventing a data leak is to understand the root cause. There are several causes of data breach incidents. A few among them are discussed here:

5 common causes of data breaches:

It is not always that data breaches stem from organized cyber criminal groups.

• Unpatched Security Vulnerabilities 

If IT security patches are not updated or addressed for extended periods, it might open the door for hackers to get easy access to your company’s confidential data assets. Not only that, it might stay unnoticed for a longer period and the extent of damage could be on the higher side.

• Manual Error 

This is one of the common reasons for data theft in an organization. The nature of the error may vary, but some of them are: creating weak and predictable passwords, sending sensitive information to the wrong people, sharing password/ account information in an open excel sheet, falling for phishing and more. Most of these human errors can be prevented by ensuring that employees are well-versed in basic data security protocols along with stringent IT security policies.

• Malware 

Malware may not be a huge concern for employees’ PCs but can be a growing threat aimed directly at the infrastructure of your company. While many of these “malware incidents” are insignificant, the sheer volume can be concerning.

The primary reason would be that the hackers can make slight changes to existing malware programs to render them unidentifiable to antivirus software while still achieving the hacker’s desired impact. 

• Insider Threats 

Insiders are one of the biggest reasons behind data breaches in organizations. If the authorized user in the IT infrastructure misuses the elevated entitlements then the enterprise data could be accessed with malicious intent. The most dangerous fact of a malicious insider is that it remains unnoticed and undetected for long as the ‘trust’ is misused.

• Physical Theft 

Theft of any official device such as pen drive, external hard drive or even laptop with critical information about the organization is the last item on our list, though it is not the least harmful. The data saved on the devices are misused after being stolen.

How to Prevent a Data Breach?

As discussed, data breach incidents can happen due to multiple reasons; similarly, there are multiple areas of IT security that can ensure prevention of data thefts. While ensuring timely patching helps to address system vulnerabilities, for today’s organizations it is also critical to have unified endpoint management platforms, which includes, Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and end-users behavior analytics measures along with robust Identity and Access Management practices. Robust (IAM) practices enforce Identity Governance and help to manage the life-cycle of identities, whether interacting with cloud resources or legacy applications. 

In addition, every end-user in an IT ecosystem should have active involvement in protecting critical data. Apart from following the IT security policies, every end-user activity needs to be monitored seamlessly at a granular level. The simple reason is every user in the IT environment could be a potential threat.

Lastly, privileged environments are the most vulnerable environments in terms of data breaches. Privileged accounts are the gateways to most of the confidential business information, and thus it is targeted by malicious third-parties, organized hacker groups and even corporate insiders. A robust and comprehensive Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution addresses the risks of unmonitored and unauthorized access to the target systems. It ensures that trusted entitlements are never compromised by enforcing authorization, authentication and audits for every privileged session. 

Conclusion

In the current IT context, where IT resources are scattered across hybrid environments and end-users access systems from anywhere, it is critical to ensure robust security policies and procedures. Organizations can significantly bring down the chances of data breach incidents if IT vulnerabilities are addressed on time by adopting endpoint protection and Identity and Access Management solutions.

Data breach incidents continue to dominate cybersecurity headlines around the globe. Despite immense emphasis on cybersecurity, data security vulnerabilities are increasing. Data breaches are happening rampantly; and businesses are too slow to react. One explanation is that cybercriminals are changing their ways to circumvent defenses to obtain unauthorized access to confidential business information. 

According to CNBC, 93% of successful data breach incidents happen in less than a minute; among which 80% victims take as long as a week to detect the breach. Another research suggests data breach incidents are increasing 33.3% on an average annually. This is indeed worrisome!

Consequences

The consequences of data breaches are very serious; and too many that harm business continuity in many ways. These consequences are something beyond just data loss and financial loss.

Beyond Financial Loss

Significant revenue loss is the most evident consequence of any data breach incident. This is undoubtedly the most immediate and hard-hitting repercussion that organizations are forced to deal with. In this blog we will discuss some apparently long-term consequences that organizations face after a cyber incident.

• Legal Battles, Non-Compliance and Penalties: An organization that deals with sensitive business or personal information is legally required to secure it round the clock. Based on geographic location and industry, every organization has to comply with regional data security mandates or Central Bank guidelines. If there is any non-compliance with IT regulations, organizations that suffer a data breach might have to pay hefty penalties. Even if the organizations notify the clients about the incident on time, they face legal battles from different stakeholders. It becomes difficult to pacify them even if they promise a cyber forensics investigation of the incident.
• Damage of Brand Reputation: News of data breach incidents travel faster than wind, and the victim can become a global news story within a matter of hours after the news is disclosed. The stakeholders immediately verify the news, and they start spreading the news from their end as well. In no time, the organization takes a hit on its brand reputation, while declining consumer trust is another cause of concern. On several occasions, the victim loses its share value in the stock market significantly. It causes irreparable and long-term damage to the organization. 
• Loss of Clients and Prospects: Existing clients of any data breach victim fear adverse effect on their business continuity. The unreliability factor starts knocking at the back of the mind while decisions to discontinue partnership linger large. They fear that their data is not in the right hands. New prospects also prefer to take the same path, and many bright business possibilities are killed before germination.
• Non-Acceptance, Resistance and Confusion among IT Staff: Post a data breach incident, an organization tends to make several IT overhauls. The data breach victim changes its IT security policy, brings changes in the hierarchy of the IT department, and roles and responsibilities of the IT end-users are also changed. Moreover, there are implementations of new processes and technologies to strengthen the data security and data integrity in the IT infrastructure. Typically, in such situations involving IT overhaul, there is human resistance to accept and understand new technologies and also to take up new responsibilities. It disrupts the overall IT process.
• Higher cost to run a business (Insurance premiums): Cyber Insurance premiums increase in case of data breach incidents. This premium is inversely proportional to cybersecurity preparedness of the organizations. These organizations majorly opt for cyber insurance as it covers cyber risks with a highly competitive monetary margin. However, it is to be noted that if there are any loopholes in the IT infrastructure or any history of data breach incident, the cyber insurance premiums get higher. 

Conclusion

Not all losses involve finances. All the consequences mentioned above are ‘heavily-priced’ as well. So what to do to avoid such obnoxious situations? The answer is adequate IT security policies and relevant cybersecurity mechanisms with regular audit trails. It not just ensures prevention of cyber threats but also maintains business continuity. The organizations can also avoid the knotty aftermath of a data breach.

On 25th May, 2018, the European Union adopted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), one of the most comprehensive compliance recommendations on data protection.

As the wave of digitization swept across the world, organizations and regulatory authorities felt the dire need to protect personal identifiable information (PII) and confidential business information.

It was felt that data processors and data controllers must centralize their focus more on secured access management in an IT environment. GDPR helped the organizations to mandatorily ensure adequate and relevant IT security policies and mechanisms.

GDPR: What is it?

GDPR compliance is strictly applicable to all EU-based organizations that generate, store and process personal information of EU citizens like names, addresses, email Ids, personal security numbers etc. The GDPR ensures secure processing of the confidential information of EU citizens with their consent.

Even non-EU organizations that process and stores data of EU residents have to comply with the mandates given by GDPR.

In order to implement GDPR successfully, a data controller and data processor play a key role in maintaining adequate information security controls. Moreover, it is highly crucial for third parties like Managed Service Providers (MSP) and Cloud Service Providers to comply with the regulations.

Watch this video to learn how organizations can ensure essential IT security requirements for robust IT security posture.

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Fundamentally speaking, every aspect of our lives revolve around data. Starting from personal records, to social media footprint and from finances to government records and retailers – everywhere we are bound by our digital identities.

At the same time, analyzing from a business perspective, every organization strives to maintain data security, data integrity and data privacy every day. By following the terms of GDPR, organizations could ensure that their confidential data assets are gathered legally and bound by the strict IT security policies.

GDPR Violations and Penalties

Till date, numerous organizations have been fined millions of euros for GDPR violations. An international airliner, a global hospitality chain, the world’s search engine giant, telecommunications giant, a global lifestyle chain… To name a few, have been penalized for violating GDPR.

The cost is huge for failing to comply with the GDPR. Organizations can be fined up to 4% of annual global turnover or €20 million (whichever is higher) in case of non-compliance with the regulation.

To avoid these hefty non-compliance penalties of GDPR, Privileged Access Management (PAM) definitely plays a crucial role. ARCON | PAM offers a unified policy engine to ensure that anyone accessing the database from anywhere in the world is authenticated and authorized. Not only that, rule and role-based granular level access control ensures security at all levels in the network periphery. This is what GDPR seeks from all the organizations.

Are we doing enough to stay GDPR compliant?

This is a million-dollar question. Effective compliance largely depends on the enterprise data security policies and data security preparedness. The mandates of GDPR clearly mention that it expects organizations to reinforce robust IT security frameworks in every layer of the IT ecosystem. Accumulation, storage and transfer of every data needs to be identified, recorded and the risk areas should be detected and mitigated. However, the question is, which security measures are we taking to stay GDPR compliant?

Per our research, the latest (May 2021) below statistics shows a different picture though.

• GDPR fines have risen by nearly 40% recently.
• Total penalties under the GDPR totaled $191.5 M.
• The authorities of GDPR recorded 19% more data breach incidents in the last 1 year

GDPR Compliance and the role of ARCON Privileged Access Management

Deploying ARCON Privileged Access Management is the easy, convenient and transparent way to ensure GDPR compliance. The solution answers the below questions in affirmatives:

• Does it maintain data privacy and security of all the data logs? Is this data encrypted?
• Is there any mechanism to notify the authorities about any data breach incident within 72 hours?
• Do the privileged identities face authorized access only?
• Is the principle of least privilege applicable?
• Is there any granular level access control over the end-users?
• Are there any secured third-party (MSP & IaaS service provider) access to the IT systems?
• Is there any continuous monitoring of every activity around critical applications?
• Are there any real-time threat analytics capabilities?
• Is it capturing logs of every critical session for audit trails and identifying anomalies?
• Is there any centralized policy engine to authenticate end-users before granting access to critical systems/ applications?

Conclusion

In a nutshell, Privileged Access Management can “Kill two birds with one stone”! In the digital age, every organization has a commitment to strengthen data protection mechanisms. ARCON | PAM is a highly effective solution to ensure ‘secure IT environment’, while it also paves the way for meeting compliance requirements. What could be a better way to stay resilient to modern cyber threats and at the same time compliant to the global regulatory standards like GDPR?