Building a digital immune system for your business

No business, large or small, is immune from the impacts of cyber threats.

Cyber attacks drew significant attention in public discourse in 2021, as Australian businesses were increasingly targeted by cybercriminals. In the 2020–21 financial year, the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) received over 67,500 reports of cybercrime — predominantly by criminals or state actors — equating to one report every eight minutes.

In the face of these rising attacks, Australian businesses must tap into the digital immune system that can be enabled through cloud technologies to stay protected. In particular, the economy of scale that cloud service providers (CSPs) provides is fundamentally changing the game of security for any business operating in today’s threat landscape. The pace of cloud security enhancements and the extent of advanced security features that are consistently released by CSPs are accelerating further. Here are three cloud strategies organisations can follow to modernise, scale and improve security for years to come.

Adopt a secure hybrid work environment

With the physical pandemic came digital side effects. The almost overnight shift to work from home sped up innovation and the uptake of new technologies in ways that were not anticipated. Hybrid work environments, while essential, have distributed employees and company assets, growing the attack surface and redefining traditional security perimeters. Multiple devices, across personal and private networks, means email, meeting, messaging and collaboration tools have become routine avenues for cyber attacks.

The answer to this challenge is to implement a zero-trust approach to security that allows businesses to maximise their employee agility and flexibility without sacrificing security. Zero trust removes the assumption of proximity to a corporate building and network so workers can work from anywhere, whether it’s the conference room or the living room.

As business leaders navigate new hybrid working arrangements, they must address rising security challenges by modernising their IT stack using the cloud — which has security baked in — to effectively mitigate or reduce the impact of cyber threats in hybrid work environments. By moving to cloud-native collaboration and communications tools, businesses of all sizes can take advantage of default protections that provide security across the entire ecosystem and through the full information processing life cycle. For example, patching is automated and there can be overall monitoring to make sure things are working right, no matter where employees are located.

Incorporate cloud technologies

All organisations — enterprises, governments, professional services, critical infrastructure or otherwise — are looking at a sizeable cybersecurity investment to ensure security, resilience and agility in the next year and beyond.

With leaders up against increased regulatory compliance, skills shortages and surging demand for secure infrastructure, CSPs can provide customers with a cost-effective means to address cybersecurity needs at scale. For many, working with a CSP makes all the difference. These partnerships provide businesses access to the evolving security capabilities needed to compile solutions into a cohesive stack, and the strategic guidance and expertise required to maintain a comprehensive security posture. Through the observance of industry megatrends, CSPs are always improving security by design, outpacing the security that on-premise infrastructure can achieve.

To ensure a secure business environment, leaders must distribute ownership of security practices to embed the discipline across the business. CSPs can support here, allowing in-house teams to focus on strategic and innovative projects that drive core business objectives, while CSPs contribute the expertise needed to manage security, controls and resilience.

Remain vigilant in the global threat landscape

With ransomware set to remain front of mind for organisations in 2022 and 66% of CIOs planning to increase spending on cyber and information security, it is important that businesses understand how cloud providers can help protect them from cyber threats. CSPs have deep insights into the global threat landscape and can apply their knowledge of threat actors and evolving tactics not just to drive specific mitigations and protections, but also to help eliminate classes of threats targeting businesses.

By working hand in hand with customer security teams, who are the domain experts of what specific security needs must be met within an organisation, CSPs can drive security enhancements and new features for the platform. This feedback-driven flywheel then works together to triage solutions and drive improvements for security globally.

When an organisation can not apply this level of resources to work closely with CSPs, which is the reality for even some large enterprises, the cloud enables another optimal security approach by allowing customers to take every security feature update provided by a CSP to protect networks, systems and data. This is what it means to fully tap into the global digital immune system cloud technologies create for businesses.

As cybercrime threatens to outpace security teams and their budgets, CSPs introduce a resilient digital immune system, leveraging accelerating feedback loops to better protect customers from ever-present cyber threats. By adopting cloud as a part of a wider cybersecurity strategy in 2022, businesses are better poised to manage risks and access agile and scalable security solutions.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/maxsim