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. 

While preparing for a long drive, we take necessary safety precautions like a stepney, spare tyre, extra fuel and other accessories to ensure a smooth journey. Just in case there is any mechanical hindrance, we can repair and resume our journey. Without any accessories, there could have been an unexpected halt.

Similarly, the business journey of any organization might face unexpected halt if there are inadequate IT security measures. In order to ensure smooth IT operations and business continuity, specific IT security policy and stringent IT security measures are required for business continuity.  It ensures that even if there is any cyber threat or malicious activity, the organization has the ability to withstand it.

Facts 

There are around 40,000 MNCs and 42.6 lakh registered SMEs in India as per statistics of 2020. Among them, 52% of organizations experienced cyber threats in the last one year. Among them, 57% of organizations suffered downtime with whopping financial losses in just one calendar year of 2020.

What are the threats?

There is a long list of cyber threats that organizations witnessed in the last few years. While many organizations successfully predicted and prevented cyber attacks, several others suffered unexpected monetary and reputational losses due to IT infrastructural loopholes. The most typical and predominant IT threats that loom large round the year consists of:

• Malicious Insiders’ Threat
• Privileged Access Misuse
• Data Theft
• Cyber Espionage
• Non-Compliance to global Regulatory Standards

How to ensure a Safe Business Journey?

Business growth and escalating revenue graph are the primary objectives of any MNC or SME across the globe. However, digital evolution has pushed organizational objectives to a topsy-turvy. To ensure business continuity and survive the cut-throat competition, most of the organizations from various industries need to have a dedicated IT security team with focus geared towards Information Security. 

• Stringent IT Security Policy: The internal organizational policies of the IT department that are meant to ensure stringent cybersecurity practices and safeguard data assets from IT risks need to be robust enough. Every role of the employees should be specified and all IT activities should be rule-and role-based. A single loophole in the policy or deviation from the standard rules might wreak havoc. 

• Dedicated & Trained IT Security Team: The robustness of IT security in an enterprise largely depends on the people of the organization. Starting from managing the data center, monitoring all the user activities, controlling all the critical accesses – an organization must have multi-layered IT security teams. It includes the IT risk management team, IT security team and audit team. A mere lackadaisical attitude in any area could be catastrophic.

• Additional Security for Privileged Accounts: Privileged accounts are the gateways to the most confidential information of an organization. A robust Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution seamlessly monitors all privileged activities even at a granular level. Misuse of privileges is one of the biggest sources of data breaches and compromise of business-critical information. It helps organizations to enforce the principle of least privilege and supports the Zero Trust security framework that is adopted by most of the organizations. In addition, it ensures prevention of cyber espionage. 

• Mechanism to detect Insider threats: Malicious insiders pose the biggest threat to organizations by obtaining unauthorized access to the business-critical systems and applications. Disgruntled employees, unauthorized third-parties, or suspicious inside agents are likely to access confidential information without any intrusion alert and cause damage. Tools like User Behaviour Analytics (UBA), Just-In-Time Privilege (JIT), Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) and frequent randomization of passwords help organizations to overcome the insider threats. Also, it builds a robust and effective risk control framework to predict cyber anomalies.

• Regulatory Compliances: Regulatory compliances like EU GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, ISO etc. help organizations to keep their data safe from breaches. The compliance bodies are extremely stringent on the norms and policies and expect organizations to abide by the standard regulations. Any kind of non-compliance costs hefty penalties to the organizations and eventually suffers a business setback.

Conclusion

Any organization desires to have a smooth, growing and uninterrupted business journey – just like a pleasant and safe long drive. All the necessary IT security measures once taken and relevant solutions adopted, an organization ensures a safe business journey.  

• Who should be assigned elevated access rights?
• How should we ensure robust access control?
• What are the best solutions available to ensure identity and access security?
• Are the right people having access to the rights systems at the right time?
• Are there adequate IT policies in place?

These are some of the critical questions that dominate IT heads’ discussions. In the era of digitalisation,
industrial automation, organizations adopt technologies like AI/ ML, Cloud Computing (IaaS and SaaS models), RPA et al. to stay at par with rapid transformation.

Subsequently, it has resulted in an urgent need for having a set of well-defined rules and regulations around access controls and IT activities, in general. The reason being that today’s complex data center environment has led to uncontrolled rise in the number of end-users.

These end-users are expected to perform baseline IT activities according to the configured policies; however, if they deviate from it, an IT incident is always a possibility. Therefore it is imperative to seamlessly manage and monitor the daily activities of end-users. But to ensure that, it is important to have people, processes and technologies in place.

Let us delve deep into the three key factors for IT security and effectiveness.

People

The robustness of IT security in an enterprise to a large extent depends on the people of the organization. To ensure a robust data center, an organization must have multi-layered IT security teams.

The people – IT Security teams, ensure that the cybersecurity policies of the organizations are strictly followed throughout. When there is an unambiguous list of “do’s and don’ts”, chances of cyber attacks decrease significantly.

Moreover, employees are kept abreast of the latest developments. They are trained with new IT security practices in regular intervals so that they are aware of the precautionary measures. With regular IT audits, IT security shortcomings are highlighted before any untoward incidents happen.

Process

After identifying people to streamline the IT activities, the next step is to have a set of well-defined processes.

It is imperative to have unambiguous guidelines as to who will access what (systems)? How will it be accessed (validation method), when it will be accessed? When to give an end-user elevated rights to systems? When there are hundreds (or maybe thousands) of people are responsible for managing the overall IT operations of an enterprise, it becomes critical for the organizations to start tracking their activities.

At the same time, it is critical that key processes and IT workflow matrix is in place to eliminate ambiguity around IT processes. From an identity and access management point of view, a few examples include: authorization policy, access policy, password policy, privileged elevation and restrictions policies etc.

Technologies

Once organizations have well-defined policies as to people and processes the next step is to identify critical technologies to ensure data integrity. From an identity and access control point of view, the following technologies developed by ARCON can help fill the security gaps.

Privileged Access Management (PAM): This robust solution enables IT security and risk management teams to have a rule and role-based contextual access control around privileged users and systems. All the people (privileged users), procedures, processes as to privileged tasks can be enforced using a unified access control engine.

Moreover, PAM solution meets the rising demand for Single-Sign-On, real-time monitoring and user restrictions capabilities in case of secured remote access. The privileged users are allowed to access the target systems strictly on a ‘need-to-know’ and ‘need-to-do’ basis along with an audit of every privileged session.

User Behaviour Analytics (UBA): This solution helps organizations to overcome any kind of ambiguity over end-users’ trust by constantly monitoring endpoints. With the help of real-time threat detection capability, this solution enables the security team to find out end-users that deviate from baseline activities. In other words UBA enables the security team to configure baseline activities as per end-users’ roles and responsibilities. It helps in securing business-critical applications.The end-user access is granted with “Just-in-time Privilege” policy to restrict the duration of the activities on applications which in turn improves the overall access control mechanism.

Security Compliance Management: This is an automated vulnerability assessment tool that enables an organization to conduct real-time assessment of baseline security configurations. It is effective for all technology platforms where security vulnerabilities arise from unauthorized end-users and unmonitored devices, applications or systems in an IT environment.

The Bottom Line:

People, Process and Technology are the three pillars for building a robust IT security posture. Vulnerabilities in any of the pillars can demolish the entire IT construction. A well-trained IT security team following a well-defined IT process and policy can ensure data integrity. Once the relevant and appropriate technologies are adopted and incorporated in the IT environment, the overall IT security turns effective.