Ken Hosac, VP IoT Strategy and Business Development at Cradlepoint
In 2018, the Ponemon Institute reported the average cost of a data breach globally is almost $4m, and this number is only set to rise in 2019 as the risks of widespread IoT adoption become increasingly clear. The dangers are great, but not as vast as the potential benefits of digital transformation. Enterprises must implement the most comprehensive security plan they’ve ever needed to fully embrace the increasingly technology-dependent business landscape.
Network security challenges
The traditional way of securing the network is obsolete. In the past, organisations would have their own data centre along with many branch offices. From a network security perspective, those buildings were treated like mini-fortresses. Each fixed location had a dedicated security appliance and a private connection over Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) to the data centre.
However, this approach is untenable today because work is no longer a place you go. Work is something you do – from anywhere. By 2020, 75 percent of all people will be working in a mobile way, according to a report by IDC. In the financial sector, research suggests that firms are prioritising flexible working as a result of employee demands. Work takes place in airplanes, hotels, customer locations, and just about anywhere else.
If an enterprise has many locations, arguably it faces greater risk of a security breach. This is particularly so for organisations with lots of small-footprint locations. These ‘locations’ could be anything from an employee on a city bus to kiosks and small offices. Even with hundreds or thousands of these to manage, many IT departments only employ up to 20 team members.
With such a lean IT team, it’s difficult to manage a widely distributed network, including employees with thousands of their own devices. It’s easy for vulnerabilities to go unnoticed, and security updates are difficult to push out, especially if the enterprise doesn’t use a cloud management system.
Minimising vulnerabilities
That’s why the enterprise has been shifting toward cloud-based applications – Office 365, Salesforce, and many more. But with 80 percent of enterprise traffic now going to cloud-based applications, the traditional model of routing all traffic through the data centre is unrealistic.
Direct-to-Internet traffic has arisen as a viable alternative to a traditional MPLS setup. Cloud storage providers and lower-cost Wide Area Network (WAN) links such as wired broadband and 4G LTE enable organisations to take much of their network traffic straight to the cloud, bypassing the data centre altogether.
However, taking data directly to the Internet threatens security. Without a combination of on-premises and cloud-based security, bypassing the data centre leaves enterprises too vulnerable to attacks and security mishaps from a wide variety of endpoints.
Distributed networks and IoT
Perhaps the toughest challenge for IT teams now is IoT devices, partly because of how widely they vary. Some IoT deployments involve the IT department throughout the process, while others take place without looping them in at all. The latter could include badge readers by the facilities department, IP cameras from the security department, or customer devices such as beacons by the marketing department.
The struggle to secure these non-traditional, often disparate devices is real, especially considering the lack of anti-malware clients for IoT devices. By 2020, more than 25% of identified attacks in enterprises will involve IoT, according to Gartner.
The headlines have been filled with IoT-related security breaches, including the Mirai malware, which turned hundreds of thousands of Linux devices into botnets, and the Reaper botnet, which could be dangerous for years to come.
The development of standards in manufacturing and communication protocols is going to take awhile. In the meantime, enterprises need to address new, innovative security models.
Best practices for mitigating risk
These constantly evolving security challenges that accompany digital transformation call for a combination of approaches. For instance, air-gapped networks place non-mission-critical traffic on a physically separate network, preventing pivot attacks to particularly sensitive data such as credit card information. Cloud-based network management is enabling IT teams to use a platform that allows remote management of distributed connectivity solutions. This enables easy, frequent, and instant security and firmware updates.
Organisations are becoming more proactive by scheduling frequent simulated attacks to test employees and root out sophisticated phishing attacks. Many enterprises are applying these best practices and addressing their abundant network security challenges with a blended approach. Having on-premises IT staff and resources at every endpoint isn’t scalable and would be far too expensive. Firms need to be looking at cloud-managed all-in-one network connectivity solutions to gain the immediacy of on-premises management with the simplicity and centralised control of the cloud.
