Governance, Control and IT Visibility.

Any guesstimates about how interconnected the world is? According to the conservative estimates, it is believed that there are about 50 billion interconnected devices. That roughly translates into trillions of end-users and digital identities including vast chains of information networks.

Our information networks are priceless. Whether big data, AI-powered programs or numerous silos of databases— they all provide us with the necessary raw data and data patterns to formulate data-centric decisions. Many thanks to the concerted global digitalization efforts, it would be correct to say that modern-day organizations are faster, fitter and sharper than ever before.

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But there is trouble. If these information networks are not taken care of, it could become counter-productive. It is akin to informal or formal human networks. Inside networks, when a group of interconnected people or a cluster becomes defunct, the entire network is weakened or sometimes it ceases to exist. History is replete with such examples.

So, who threatens these information networks? Anyone… Any malefactor who wants to inflict damage to information networks. While financial gains are the obvious priorities for the “enemy within”, we are witnessing a surge in state-sponsored malware, ransomware and APT types of attacks.

And when these information networks are compromised, the entire IT ecosystem can collapse. Needless to say, building IT visibility is as important as expanding your information networks. IT visibility ensures governance and controls around people, policies and procedures.

Consider a simple example involving enterprise privileged access management inside a typical data center. An enterprise has several databases, so it entitles admins to administer day-to-day tasks. The enterprise also has network devices, OSes, and a host of applications. These IT assets require IT users, Network Admins and System Admins’ attention. Resultantly, the enterprise will have a greater number of privileged users, more endpoints and more processes.

However, during a course of time, the ecosystem expands further. Now the enterprise has business-privileged users accessing business-critical applications. Correspondingly, several SaaS applications, DevOps tool kits and non-human IDs proliferate to ensure efficiency and automation.

On top of that, there are third-party users and users with RDP entitlements. It gradually becomes a complex environment, isn’t it? Lack of visibility in this backdrop might result in the misuse of “privileged entitlements”. Critical information, data, or other forms of confidential IT assets can be compromised. The damage can be huge.

Now imagine if the cost arising from the lack of visibility over the data center environment is so high that it can have what impact it can have if your entire information networks are jeopardized.

The bottom-line

In order to ensure robust Information networks, enterprises must increase IT visibility. It enforces IT governance and controls.