Archive for category: News

Technology is ever-growing and will not slow down with new innovative methods any time soon. With new technologies or stronger technologies surfacing regularly, this becomes a concern for protecting your data from breaches in every new way possible. EY’s Emerging Tech at Work 2023 survey reveals that 89% of employees believe adopting emerging tech benefits their company. Still, cybersecurity risk can be a barrier to adoption. In the same survey, approximately 73% of employees are concerned about the cybersecurity risks associated with generative AI, and 78% worry about quantum computing. Additionally, only one in five executives see their organizations’ cybersecurity measures as effective for today and the future. Forbes Council Member, Steve Gickling and CTO of Calendar – a place for unified calendars and all your scheduling needs – shares an article depicting 4 effective ways you can defend your business from data breaches.

1. Start with clear-cut training. “Combining upskilling and streamlined practices is often a solid approach to addressing the human element. If employees aren’t safeguarding their passwords, there’s probably a best practice they don’t fully understand. Teaching them how to recognize phishing attempts and social engineering tactics is a start, but it’s even better to educate them on why automated password management solutions simplify the use of internal technology and protect the organization.”
2. Shield the cloud. “Organizations rely on cloud service providers for security, but that doesn’t mean those providers are necessarily protecting their clients’ data adequately. Anything from incorrect configurations to insufficient security permissions can leave a company vulnerable to cybercriminals seeking an opportunity. Auditing cloud providers and solutions can sort out who’s responsible for what. Find out what vulnerabilities providers see in their solutions and follow their recommendations on how to close the loopholes. Tech leaders can also consider implementing cloud monitoring and security software, which looks for potential issues. These vulnerabilities might be unauthorized users, a lack of data encryption and/or weak access controls. Monitoring software could also reveal whether data storage isn’t private, increasing its exposure to malicious actors.”
3. Monitor for data leaks. “What if your employees are using the same passwords for both their personal and professional accounts? The leaked information could be from a vendor’s software platform. Cybercriminals are known to try exposed, easy-to-guess and common passwords. They may look at online org charts, hoping to find a match between a leaked personal password and an employee’s account. When implementing a data leak detection solution, workplaces need to find tools that will help them accomplish the best practices for their chosen software. To maximize the software they’ve established, a few key steps are to regularly train employees on using the most current version, constantly monitoring any potential risks and always maintaining secure processes to access the data.”
4. Minimize data retention. “Storing data on your network comes with inherent risks, including the chance it will fall into unwanted hands. By only keeping what’s necessary, you can reduce the probability that sensitive data will become exposed. Enacting data retention procedures should thus be part of your organization’s critical cybersecurity plan. Another aspect to minimize is the locations where information is housed. Streamlining the amount of places the company stores data can reduce vulnerabilities. The fewer places sensitive information is, the less potential there is for exposure. As you condense data storage locations, however, be sure to keep close tabs on what data is being stored and where.”

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When it comes to backing up your organization’s valuable data, many folks are either stuck in old less secure ways or are simply not backing them up correctly – or at all. The point of backing up data is to have it be restored in a company’s system if they lose it somehow either due to cybersecurity attacks, a natural disaster, or data center and system failures. Eric Herzog, Forbes Council Member and Chief Marketing Officer at Infinidat, shares an article explaining from an IT perspective how organizations should go about securing their backed up data. He states, “From an IT perspective, backup targets have usually been measured on how fast they are, their ability to reduce the amount of data backed up and how economical they are for storage. However, ransomware and malware attacks have recently been focusing on backup infrastructure, as well as data on primary storage… Cybercriminals have learned that, to be effective, they need to not only attack data on primary storage but also disrupt backup storage.” Attacking backup storage allows cybercriminals to make a company even more vulnerable when attacking their main servers as well. This would be difficult to nearly impossible for a company to recover from a cyberattack to your backup data. With these new, more sophisticated approaches to attacking backup storage, cybercriminals are slowly “poisoning” the copies of data. With this known tactic, IT leaders and Security divisions at companies are focusing on added cybersecurity to their backup data as well. “In light of this new threat scenario that virtually all enterprises now face, the backup storage needs to take on additional responsibilities, such as expediting near-instantaneous cyber recovery or hosting recoveries with a dual role,” says Herzog. “This is noteworthy because, even if backup storage fights off a ransomware or malware attack, the cyberattack may have already reached production data on IT systems and primary storage. Enterprises need a higher level of cyber resilience to ensure that they are equipped to handle ransomware, malware and other cyberattacks.” According to Herzog, cyber secure backup storage needs to incorporate the following capabilities: immutability of data, high availability, data encryption, multifactor authentication, automation or a certain level of artificial intelligence, and cyber storage guaranteed service level agreements (SLAs). He concludes that it is best to look for cyber secure backup storage that utilizes the same underlying operating system that facilitates speedy backups. This varies based on your specific enterprise’s requirements and you may need a software-defined system that maximizes available storage capacity and offers data deduplication, such as a purpose-built backup appliance. But for those enterprises that have a higher priority on the backup target hosting application and data recovery, Herzog notes that choosing a primary storage platform that is repositioned as a backup target is the more appropriate choice.

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already providing value to businesses in ways that may not be obvious. Walter Sun, Global head of artificial intelligence at SAP, shares a great read on ERP Today about how much value AI is providing for your business. One example he shares is German retailer Lidl saw significant improvements like 15% better inventory management and 20% decrease in waste by bringing in historical business data, consumer sentiment, financial information and weather forecasts to better predict demand in their stores. SAP has also launched an AI tool called Joule which can answer complex business questions by analyzing company data. A user could ask how to improve store performance and Joule would generate an answer combining relevant information from different sources. While AI capabilities like generating art or text seem impressive, the real value lies in using data to enhance decision making and boost business performance. As supply chain management, manufacturing and customer experience all benefit from AI, it will allow any employee to access trusted insights without needing analytical expertise. The future potential for AI adoption across industries is huge. If implemented responsibly, Sun explains, AI could transform industries in coming years by enabling more accurate short-term forecasting, proactive disruption mitigation, optimized manufacturing while reducing inventory costs, and truly personalized customer experiences. Emerging regulations will provide guidance to build trust as AI gradually integrates into workplaces. Developers also need to center people, focus on customers’ critical processes, leverage real business data and take ethics seriously.

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