This Ransomware Awareness Month, we are focusing on the risks it poses to digital transformation.
Digital transformation is a hot topic in the modern world: organisations in a diverse range of sectors such as Finance, Healthcare, Retail, and Manufacturing are searching for ways to drive innovation, increase connectivity, and gain a competitive advantage. With technological advancements facilitating global networks and increasing capacity to collect and share an influx of fresh data, organisations can enjoy faster connectivity, agility, and responsiveness.
However, no growth comes without risk. As an organisation becomes more connected, its network becomes more complex, posing significant challenges to identity and cybersecurity measures. Adopting new technologies such as APIs, LLMs, and the Cloud increases an organisation’s attack surface. Across a vast network, their individual machine identities can be a challenge to monitor for anomalies. When considering threats, organisations must also take stock of the risk of human error. In modern work employees operate in a blended environment, moving seamlessly between work applications and personal apps. This can result in a lot of freely available open-source data, or OSINT, which cybercriminals use for social engineering purposes to customise phishing attacks. All it takes is for one employee to click a link in a phishing email, or one machine identity to be exploited, and a bad actor can potentially have access to an organization’s entire database. The results from a ransomware attack, as seen with the Ascension Healthcare Incident and most recently CDK Global, can have a devastating effect on business, daily operations, and consumer trust – not to mention the costs incurred from downtime, disruption, and potentially paying the ransom.
If the risk in digital transformation is deemed too high to invest in, organisations can potentially become outdated, which not only poses cybersecurity risks but can also lead to them stagnating and falling behind their competition. As such, organisations should strike a balance between digital transformation and improving their cybersecurity posture, without measures that restrict and slow their workflow. In this instance, a zero-trust framework is an invaluable solution. Zero-Trust strategies practically apply identity and access management capabilities to continuously assess the risk every time resources are accessed within an environment by both employee and machine identities. It only grants access for the right reasons, to the right person, for the right amount of time. In turn, this can prevent employees and threat actors from accessing an entire database and enables a stronger security posture, where keeping personal and sensitive data secure has no impact on productivity or business agility. If a breach occurs, security teams are immediately notified and can respond and resolve the issue.
As the technological landscape continues to develop, driving digital transformation and giving cybercriminals access to new tools and information, organisations must strike a balance between adopting new technologies and improving their cybersecurity measures. To stay ahead, organisations should implement Zero-Trust strategies to support growth, workflow, and keep important data safe and secure.
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