When asked about how organizations protect the confidentiality and integrity of sensitive data, the answer is always Cybersecurity. However, more often than not, this term is loosely tossed in conversations without understanding its potential. Cybersecurity practices no longer fall under emerging technologies, instead, they have quickly become the necessity for enterprises. But how can cybersecurity be explained now that it’s an integral part of all industries? If you have chosen to read this blog, it means that you want to know more about cybersecurity and how it works.
Let's start with the definition of Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity is the term to aggregate collective technological practices towards defending computer, electronic as well as enterprise server systems with their sensitive data against cyberattacks or unauthorized access. The primary purpose of cybersecurity is securing organizational data both from internal or external threats which requires an efficient and well-coordinated effort across information systems with specialized hardware and programs. Domains involving data must develop an impenetrable cybersecurity model with redundant protocols against cyber threats.
What value does Cybersecurity hold in the 21st century?
With its definition out of the way, let’s bring in some numbers. According to Statista, the average financial losses, as of 2020, incurred in data breaches were an estimated $3.86M globally with $8.64 just in the United States alone. Worth mentioning is the most critical sector, healthcare, suffered an average breach cost of $7.12M. This estimated figure includes the expense of addressing the data breach, the revenue loss incurred in downtime, regulatory fines to stakeholders, and most importantly, the long-term reputational damage to businesses and subsidiary brands.
The primary subdomains of Cybersecurity
An unbreachable cybersecurity protocol consists of multiple layers of protection that defend critical systems against cybercriminals, including attacks that attempt to illegally access, manipulate or sabotage organizational/user data. Whether in application security, identity management, or network security, organizational assets are built off of different disparate systems. As enterprise infrastructures, internet-connected devices, and IoT are widespread across dozens of sectors, categorizing cybersecurity into subdomains makes it easier to understand its implication.
1. Infrastructure Security: While infrastructure security fundamentally refers to permanent assets such as real estate, in cybersecurity, it involves technological assets including enterprise computers, networking systems, and cloud – on both hardware and software. The purpose of infrastructure security not only involves defense against synthetic threats, such as planned cyberattacks but also accounts for natural threats. On the topic of resilience, infrastructure security also considers how enterprises can address/recover from cyberattacks.
2. Cloud Security: While infrastructure security offers greater resiliency against physical threats, cloud security accounts for practices that are adopted to defend data centers, networking, and computing environments. The only difference from infrastructure security being they are primarily deployed on the software level to protect organizational or personal data stored on data centers, or more commonly, your cloud data. Cloud security is unique in the form of its Shared Responsibility Model that outlines who is responsible for the data.
3. Threat Detection and Response: Breaches are an ultimate nightmare for IT departments across enterprises, and of course, preparing against in advance has priorities rather than recovering from it. Threat detection and response is the practice of interpreting past breaches and identifying whether similar malicious activities are incurred in the system. If vulnerabilities are detected, mitigation protocols are immediately deployed to neutralize the threat before it can further access, sabotage, or worst cases, extract confidential info from data centers.
4. Identity and Access Management (IAM): On top of cloud security, identity and access management ensure that only the right people with authorization can access information and tools they need. Enterprises need IAM services to provide security and narrow points of failure. As administrative transparency is becoming important in day-to-day operations, with an effective IAM solution, organizations can guarantee the highest standards of identity security while being more flexible than traditional username and password solutions.
5. Managed Security Services: While proactive security measures are high-in-demand in cyberspace, many organizations have been found to put off introducing mature security initiatives into their operations unless they have incurred some sort of security breach. Whether an organization is lacking necessary staffing or require expertise and resources to expand their security capabilities, Managed Security Services (MSS) offers an incessant oversight, which enables faster deployments and an improved time-to-value on investments.
6. Network and Communication Security: Designed to shield the sustainability and integrity of critical network infrastructures, Network and Communication Security includes both hardware and software to target and mitigate varieties of threats and prevent them from sabotaging an organization's network infrastructure. Network and communication security combine diverse defense protocols and enable policies that block malware from carrying out exploits, as well as protecting proprietary information from phishing attacks.
What does the future of cybersecurity hold?
With many practical applications already implemented in diverse sectors and more to emerge, cybersecurity is key towards digitization. As security firms continue to develop more robust infrastructure against cyberattacks, exploits are still eminent, requiring an edge over cyber criminals. What's promising is the fact that industry leaders, as well as end-users, will gradually educate themselves on cybersecurity and how to use it. More importantly, new expertise will guarantee updates every iteration, further ensuring that cybersecurity can protect against emerging threats.
How Lantern Systems can help you ace your Cybersecurity measures?
The industry-wide adoption of IoT has further emphasized cybersecurity, aiming towards providing advanced cyber defenses to business infrastructure. Whether at individual-level or enterprise-scale, Lantern Systems helps enable an end-to-end suite of context-aware and risk-focused cybersecurity solutions, offering resiliency against enterprise security threats. For over 20 years, being an IT, communications, and security systems integrator, Lantern Systems has been delivering engineering services, project services, and software solutions with its global domain expertise.
