This blog was written by an independent guest blogger.
Cybersecurity is no longer an outlandish concept to many business enterprise executives. What is still relatively unfamiliar to many organizations and their leadership, however, is the task of evaluating their cyber strategy and risk to determine how best to adapt and grow to stay secure while remaining competitive.
Executives must initiate thorough evaluations of their existing cybersecurity strategies to figure out which types of new technologies and risk management strategies they need the most.
Apart from remaining competitive with other businesses that are also increasing their cybersecurity posture, it's vital for businesses both large and small to implement more adaptive cybersecurity to combat the ever-looking threat of data breaches and attacks from cybercriminals.
To that end, let’s take a look at the top three most important strategies that enterprise executives need to adopt to keep up with an evolving security landscape and a high prevalence of threats to data security:
Regular surveillance of the application security layer
Organizations have good reason to be concerned about cybercrime such as phishing emails and ransomware attacks, which witnessed a 37% increase last year and resulted in total average business costs of nearly $4.5 million. Adaptive cybersecurity and the strategies that come with it are the best hope business executives have to stave off increasingly sophisticated cybercrimes such as ransomware.
Any business with an established digital presence or eCommerce store knows that their customers need 24/7 access to their web applications and software. There's no question, then, that application security is an important part of a larger adaptive cybersecurity strategy.
Consider that approximately 84% of software breaches exploit application layer-level security vulnerabilities, and you'll begin to understand why executives need to adopt application security testing tools to keep their customers' data as well as their own organizational data assets secure from threats.
To secure and protect data at the application layer-level, executives require a single platform that they and their IT department can use to regularly assess security risks that face their applications.
According to the cybersecurity analysts at Cloud Defense, you can use a unified platform to secure custom code, open source libraries DKs (software development kits), and APIs (application programming interfaces) to catch security bugs early and often before they impact users or systems. Platforms such as these make it easy to enforce security policies, secure custom code and open source libraries, ultimately achieving preventative security to catch bugs early and often.
The future of mitigating threats at the application layer requires tools and approaches that ensure the layer;s security requires careful control of user input. Executives can direct their IT departments to lock down session security and user access as well as harden apps against threats such as SQL injections. Ultimately, the future of application-layer security requires that business executives lean on an adage of the past: never fully trust the user.
Blending AI and cybersecurity
The modern landscape of cybersecurity requires that businesses go beyond simply purchasing antivirus and anti-malware programs (and perhaps choosing a virtual private network). The promise of adaptive security guarantees 24/7/365 surveillance without the need for upgrades or human interference. Artificial intelligence can potentially accelerate innovative security solutions that not only respond to threats in real-time but that also evolve alongside them.
AI can make adaptive security possible in such a way that a business's security architecture can work on every level to respond to external and internal threats, all in real-time. More importantly for businesses that may not be nationwide enterprises, AI can help automatically scale these security solutions based on the individual needs of a company. AI represents a scalable solution in response to cyber threats that are constantly evolving and need to be tracked 24/7.
AI, which adapts to evolving cyber threats through real-time data, can also benefit from the Internet of Things (IoT) to mitigate threats to internet-enabled devices. The emergence of mobile technology has created a broader landscape for cyber criminals to operate across. IoT can combat these threats with network segmentation and policies to segment IoT-enabled devices from guest and private networks, which is a powerful addition to agile AI systems that detect threats in real-time.
Increase data security with encryption over VPNs
It's highly likely that your business makes use of Wi-Fi to some extent. In light of the pandemic, many business executives face the challenge of maintaining a remote workforce that's operating on a secure wireless network.
To secure communications between devices such as laptops and smartphones and their access points, it's recommended that your business begins to use Wi-Fi communication over a VPN service or a secure website (HTTP).
Businesses that use a VPN to encrypt information between wireless devices can use a "tunneling" process to privately and securely transmit data over the internet. Encrypting data is one of the most effective security measures for remotely dispersed teams to implement, since it ensures that no IP addresses are visible to websites visited on your devices and that data is always encrypted to your VPN server. With VPN encryption, businesses can protect their confidentiality and prioritize the privacy of their data, whether it's stored on a physical device or communicated online or over an internal network.
Adaptive cybersecurity strategies deserve tools to securely transmit data in a private and reliable manner. No matter how small or innocuous you feel your data is, it's important that any information you transfer between your devices is encrypted.
Any data assets of yours that fall into the hands of cyber criminals can wind up permanently affecting your reputation and negatively impacting your business financially. Make sure to protect your business with VPN encryption to keep your data safe at all times as you continue to work remotely.
Summary
The modern landscape of cybersecurity requires that businesses continue to adapt and grow to remain secure and stay competitive. To that end, business executives can begin building a foundation for continuously evolving cybersecurity by starting with their application security layer. So long as your business has any type of established digital presence, it's essential that you secure and protect your data at the application layer-level.
