How can cyber security boost the economy?

The financial sector in Bangladesh is evolving faster than ever. The economy is one of the fastest growing

in 2020. Cybersecurity has become very important as the country’s digitalisation pace has necessitated the need to secure information assets. A compromise of credentials, or an illegitimate access to privileged accounts can inflict heavy financial losses (data breach) to organizations, which could have strong repercussions on the economy. Therefore the economic well-being of any country is directly proportional to cyber security preparedness.

ARCON is a well-known brand in the country since the last three years with some of the big names from the BFSI segment deploying our enterprise-class solutions. Due to the pandemic and ongoing travel restrictions, ARCON could not hold its annual security conference. However, ARCON along with its local partner conducted an exclusive webinar targeting some of the well-known organizations in the nation. The idea was to highlight the fact that how robust cybersecurity can boost an economy.

Indeed, cyber crime/incidents can have an alarming impact on the global economy. In the Indian subcontinent, almost $215 billion has been lost in 2018 which is almost 1.3% of the entire GDP of SouthEast Asia. By now, it would have soar beyond imagination. It is estimated that by 2021, cyber crime will cost the world in excess of $6 trillion annually.

To discuss this situation, ARCON, in an exclusive webinar organized by its partner on 10th November 2020, delivered the views on “Cybersecurity: An Economy Booster”. Mr. Yahya Khan represented ARCON in the webinar and he vividly explained how ARCON solutions are reinforcing adequate security measures for large and mid-scale enterprises to manage and control information security. The broader agenda of the session included:

• How should we secure human access to enterprise digital assets
• How should we manage and control the privileged accounts of an enterprise
• How should we mitigate threats arising from unmonitored endpoints
• How should we ensure a robust access control system in the enterprise network

To start the session, Mr. Khan drew a simple analogy of ‘Who watches the Watchman’ as in most cases people have the prima facie of ARCON solutions as just a cybersecurity solution. However, the pattern of cyber threats have come a long way and ARCON opines that IT operations are no more safe with just risk-preventive solutions. Instead, the risks need to be predicted well in advance. Some of the key takeaways from the session are as follows:

• The access control mechanism is complicated for any organization. IT infra includes operating systems, network, databases, critical devices and business applications. Absence of policies around people and policies could create IT chaos resulting in data breach. ARCON | PAM with the help of granular control features over admins and privileged users protects the systems and applications from unauthorized access and unintentional errors. It controls the privileged users seamlessly with a rule and role-based centralized policy.

• With Single-Sign-On (SSO) of ARCON | PAM, the IT security team can have one-time administrative access to a different category of systems and devices without entering the login credentials. In a larger IT infrastructure, the challenges of multiple administrators, multiple user-ids, multiple passwords and multiple accesses are resolved by SSO feature.

• Regarding managing the privileged passwords, organizations stumble a lot while storing the passwords manually. ARCON | PAM with its robust password vault helps organizations to store passwords in a highly secure electronic vault. Above all, this engine frequently rotates and randomizes the dynamic passwords to prevent any unauthorized access in the critical systems.

• Today, organizations are in dire need of monitoring the day to day IT activities seamlessly. ARCON | PAM with its real-time session monitoring helps organizations to detect and identify any suspicious elements in the network and flags off immediately to the administrator. In addition, the overall activities can be reviewed in a live dashboard which helps the risk management team to spot the anomaly with ease.

• Regular IT audits have become must in most of the organizations today. Based on the user activity reports, the organizations take crucial steps to ensure end-to-end security in the IT ecosystem. ARCON | PAM offers a provision of generating detailed reports of all the activities done by the users on a given date and time. This report is even customizable as per role of the users, department and predefined time.

• Very often organizations manage the passwords of business-critical applications through a single terminal in the IT infrastructure. ARCON’s App to App Password Management is an automated password change process which helps to manage and synchronize the entire process with the required details of the servers, the IP addresses and thereby prevents cyber disruptions.

• Misuse of the endpoint privileges is one of the biggest sources of data theft. Poor endpoint management leads to both data theft and ambiguity over access to business-critical applications. ARCON | Endpoint Privilege Management (EPM) bridges the security gap between unmanaged endpoints and IT administrators in an enterprise network by allowing endpoint privileges to the authorized users exclusively. It even helps the risk management team to segment the users based on their roles and responsibilities.

• Today Work From Home (WFH) practice has propelled the urgency to implement secure remote accesses to business-critical applications and systems globally. Organizations require a robust IT security mechanism to manage, control, monitor remote access and the IT risk management team is more agile in establishing trustworthiness. helps the administrators to provide safe and seamless desktop support for the employees working remotely.

• Lastly, ARCON | PAM is the epitome of administrative ease when it comes to managing privileged accounts in organizations’ network periphery. Factors like high performance, high scalability, secure elevation, one admin console for admin access and smooth deployment process offers a competitive advantage to ARCON.

Before drawing the conclusion, Mr. Khan answered all the questions asked by the attendees related to the features of ARCON | PAM solution. The ease of deployment and administrative ease, security benefits, and the value for money were discussed with lucidity. Considering the economic growth and fast pace of digitalisation, Bangladesh even in this pandemic scenario, is allocating a handsome budget for secure IT infrastructure. This exclusive webinar emphasized the importance of robust cybersecurity controls to boost the economy.

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.