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Enterprise Security Magazine | Friday, September 23, 2022
A practical and well-maintained enterprise security program is essential in today's society. Bad actors continuously scan the internet for vulnerable targets. An effective enterprise security program is necessary for establishing a defensive posture that forces those with malicious intent to move on to an easier target.
FREMONT, CA: Effective enterprise security programs facilitate, rather than impede, the enterprise's mission. Businesses are vulnerable to malicious intent from countless bad actors and organized criminals without an effective security program.
Numerous factors contribute to the success of a business, but the enterprise environment is one of the most crucial. A robust enterprise security plan and additional enterprise security tools are essential for protecting technology in enterprise environments. The enterprise security plan must describe how the organization will address the identified risks and associated threats.
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Security tools and internal processes to support the enterprise security plan can begin once the plan has been formulated. Enterprise security is a crucial aspect of business operations because it safeguards the data and information upon which the company's mission depends. Without a defined approach to implementing enterprise IT security to protect data and information, businesses are susceptible to data loss, theft, destruction, etc., which can harm their reputation, result in fines for loss of customer data, or even cause a business to fail.
Effective enterprise security program implementation requires time, concentration, and resources. If organizations lack an effective enterprise security program, it can be overwhelming to get started.
Utilize knowledge of which data, systems, and infrastructure are crucial to business and where organizations are most vulnerable to attack. Then, develop a plan to implement, evaluate, and manage the implemented controls.
There are different types of internal controls, so enterprises should prioritize those controls that are relatively simple to implement and offer significant security and protection benefits.
Define and Manage the Enterprise IT Assets
To protect organizations, they must thoroughly understand the assets it possesses. Enterprise security inventory includes all information assets (servers, workstations, and cloud services) that support the enterprise's mission. External services used by the enterprise support enterprise information assets.
Before cloud computing became widely adopted, enterprises defined their IT boundaries by their on-premise and co-located computing assets. With the seemingly ubiquitous adoption of cloud services, the enterprise cybersecurity boundary is blurring and is no longer geographically defined. It must be expanded to incorporate cloud-based services.
For instance, a company may have information assets on-premises at its corporate location but may also utilize AWS or Azure for additional computing resources and storage.
There is a shared responsibility model associated with the use of cloud services. The enterprise is responsible for implementing protections and controls to ensure that the cloud services are not leaving them vulnerable to attack or breach. Therefore, these external services must be included in the organization's inventory of IT assets to ensure that controls are implemented appropriately.
Defining the enterprise asset inventory is essential because undefined assets cannot be protected (see point four below). Enterprises must determine which assets are persistent on their network and which are transient (e.g., sales staff laptops) and may not be as up-to-date with security patches as continuous devices.
Using active or passive discovery tools will assist organizations in developing their inventory and understanding the extent of the work required to protect each network asset. Unfamiliar devices should be investigated promptly and removed from the network, quarantined, or approved for use, depending on the results (and the inventory should be updated). Creating an inventory of hardware assets (including virtual hardware) will assist with the second step.
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