Near term Cyber Security Solutions for the Digital Economy

SecurBayNews

Cyber security seems to be heading for long terms challenges these days.  In the last one decade, the

conventional boundaries of enterprise have broken and dissolved.  Enterprises need to now deal with the extended eco-system including customers, partners, suppliers, employees, contractors and finally end-consumers of the product and service.

Digital Economy

The Digital Economy is defined as an economy depending on Internet and Digital Technologies.   Right from customer acquisition to payments, there are multiple channels of transactions and interactions available, leading to what is called as an ‘omni channel environment’.  Both B2B and B2C economics will need this multi-lateral, multi-layered information flow.   This really complicated the way data and information flow is protected and secured. And therefore the result is a multi-pronged cybersecurity solution need.

Cyber Security for Digital Economy – Near term Solutions

According to Greg Shannon, Chief Scientist, CERT,– there are basically four basic pillars of cybersecurity space – trust, people, efficiency and measured outcomes.  All these factors have influence each other, making or dismantling businesses and finally the economic success.    There is a near term and long term strategy involving people, technology and processes.

The near term solution involvestaking an ecosystem approach – The ecosystem being completely IT enabled – products, business processes and services.   The solutions include Threat Analysis, Two factor Authentication and Building Risk management models.

Two factor Authentication (2FA) is already prevalent in all online transactions – e-commerce and banking.   This is also prevalent with cloud based email services which now have many applications – where 2FA is combined with Single Sign on.

Threat Analysis is the process of having ‘the knowledge of internal and external information vulnerabilities pertinent to an enterprise, and matching them to real world cyber-attacks.  This threat oriented approach to combating cyber-attacks, identifies from being a reactive one to a proactive one.  This results in a concerted effort of building information assessment systems that tracks vulnerabilities and cyber-attacks, and then provides a dashboard of actionable intelligence.

Finally, at the level of Risk Management and models – a detailed analysis of risk assessment at the ecosystem level needs to be done and the business models of enterprises should factor in various aspects of risks – legal, financial and operational risks, apart from any liabilities that can arise out of it.

In short, a three tiered near-term cybersecurity approach can help the organization to quickly realign to the immediate challenges of the digital economy.

We will analyse medium and long term approach next week.

 

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Next blog :  Mid Term Security Measures for Digital Economy