With 2020 almost at our threshold, the evolution of digital technology is expected to take a big leap this year, thanks to the influence of Cloud computing, Big Data, AI and IoT. Technology, while getting more advanced, brings sophisticated cyber threats simultaneously that can strike hard in organizations across every industry. Truly, cyber threats will continue to disrupt organizations in 2020 as well.
In the meantime, the security framework needs to be fine-tuned as several regulatory standards mandate reinforcing the cyber security posture. Access Control, authentication, behaviour analytics will be critical to address the growing challenges of the data breach. ARCON, being a global thought leader on risk management domain, has emphasized on three “must-have” security features that can ease off most of the information security worries among the organizations and make them security-ready for the coming year.
Trend 1: User Behaviour Analytics
Monitoring end-user behavior is going to be extremely crucial in 2020. Today’s IT environment is getting increasingly distributed in nature. The number of end-users is increasing rapidly and organizations struggle to manage and monitor user activities in the network periphery. Organizations create user entitlements but these are often misused by compromised insiders or third-party users. On many occasions, suspicious activities go undetected. Organizations mostly fail to detect anomalous activities inflicted by malicious insiders and suspicious third-party users. These tainted users are likely can inflict a heavy loss with the help of elevated permission like privileged access through which highly-critical information can be misused. 2020 is going to be a year when organizations will concentrate on predicting risks rather than taking preventive measures after the damage. Hence, a robust tool like User Behaviour Analytics (UBA) would be on top of IT security team’s preference list because it can predict and warn the IT administrators regarding possible threats well in advance underlying in the IT system. ARCON | UBA essentially uses machine learning, Artificial Intelligence to analyze behavioral patterns.
Trend 2: MFA (Multi-factor Authentication) with adaptive authentication
A single layer of authentication or even two-factor authentication to access confidential business information is no more reliable. In 2020, modern IT infrastructure demands advanced Multi-level authentication (adaptive authentication) layers that will strengthen the security structure. It is required because login credentials, OTP and biometric steps can be compromised. Also, the modern day IT environment is getting fragmented. As a result, both unmanaged machines and unmanaged users have spiraled up.
The mechanism of adaptive authentication is based out of the experience of past user behaviour which mostly happens through Geo location, Typing speed or IP address. This way it determines whether the user activity is happening through an authentic environment, else, the administrator is notified in no time. Thus, MFA with adaptive authentication enhances user experience with a robust validation mechanism that assures IT administrators about the authenticity of the users.
Trend 3: Fine-Grained approach to mitigate risks
As organizations adopt digitalization, it invites more number of users, many access points which eventually increases security risks. These risks can be mitigated with the help of rule and role-based access control policy which helps organizations to protect their systems from unauthorized access and unintentional errors. The fine-grained approach restricts and controls privileged users. ARCON | PAM provides the deepest level of granular control which restricts users by offering command filtering and command restricting capabilities including restricting users based on group wise, service wise, department wise, day wise, time wise, and duration wise to ensure secure, authorized and controlled access.
ARCON is a leading enterprise risk control solutions provider, specializing in risk-predictive technologies. ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics enables to monitor end-user activities in real-time. ARCON | Privileged Access Management reinforces access control and mitigates data breach threats. ARCON | Secure Compliance Management is a vulnerability assessment tool.