93% of your company networks can be penetrated by cybercriminals. This means, that in 93% of cases, an external entity could break through your defensive mechanisms and gain access to your local network resources.
What can happen next? Your business could be at risk of losing sensitive company data, theft of intellectual property, and breaching regulatory requirements that could result in a hefty penalty.
Despite this, only 50% of small and medium businesses (SMBs) have a security plan in place to safeguard their IT infrastructure.
This blog discusses how infrastructure security plays a crucial role in ensuring confidentiality, availability, and integrity of data to ensure the long-term stability of organizations.
Why do we need infrastructure security?
Today’s world is driven by digital technology, digital experiences, and digital security. In this landscape, enterprises greatly rely on data to make informed business decisions to protect their servers, networks, and IT workloads. With more and more devices accessing corporate networks, up goes the frequency of users accessing your organization’s intellectual property (IP) through public networks.
As a mechanism to combat cybercriminals and malicious actors, businesses need to invest in a robust infrastructure security strategy that tackles both cyber and physical security attacks across all important endpoints including cloud-native systems, servers, networks, and physical data centers.
What are the 3 key elements of infrastructure security?
From a security standpoint, your IT infrastructure trickles down to three major components that most security and risk management (SRM) leaders deem necessary for an organization to operate safely. These include securing your company network, monitoring and managing users at critical endpoints, and future-proofing your (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) IaaS model. Before going forward, let’s shed some light on these elements.
- Network-based security
How can my organization modernize its network security strategy? Should we migrate our network security tools to the cloud? What are the ways we can provide safe access to any application from any device?
These are some questions you would think of as a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) for your business. But how exactly would you go about evolving your infrastructure security practices? The answer lies in adopting a holistic approach based on regular assessments, accountability, and ensuring enforcement of IT security policies at the grassroots level. Putting in place modern security architectural paradigms to secure your IT infrastructure should be your first option.
- Endpoint security
This part of infrastructure security requires protecting computer networks that are virtually linked with the client-end devices. As a security leader you want to devise policies and procedures that align with your business integrity goals, and in turn, protect vital enterprise information being distributed at multiple endpoints.
In simple words, an endpoint is any device that connects with your company’s network from outside a firewall you’ve enabled. Starting off with the right endpoint detection and response (EDR) is essential in meeting your infrastructure security management initiatives in the long run.
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when someone says you should use a cloud computing architecture to protect your organization’s most crucial data?
If you’ve never invested in a cloud-based solution before, chances are you’d think it’s too risky or it might be quite complex. As difficult as it sounds, all it takes is avoiding improper configurations and security management pitfalls that ultimately lead you to a data breach.
You can make IaaS, a cloud computing service model, a secure starting point. Moving forward, your focus should be on enabling a correct security posture in the cloud that helps you develop better visibility over your cloud workloads.
Building the robust tech backbone
There are 4 types of infrastructure security starting from data, application, and all the way down to network and physical security. A good practice for critical infrastructure protection is to take into account all these elements since protecting your data is as important as securing your networks from outsider threats, updating software firmware and developing data recovery plans for natural disasters.
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