Graduation 2016: 5 Tips to Get an ‘A’ in IT Security

Here are tips for firms seeking to support employees’ technology choices while mitigating security risks. Security education is a key part of these guidelines.

Many organizations like to give their employees the freedom to use the platforms and tools they are most comfortable with, including operating systems, applications and devices. However, the more freedom organizations give employees, the more vulnerable the IT infrastructure is to a breach. To prevent breaches, guidelines should be put in place to help regulate employee computer and Internet use. These policies can vary company-to-company, but it’s important to implement across-the-board standards to reduce risk.

Employees today, especially new grads, are accustomed to using all sorts of technology to collaborate and increase efficiency. It’s unreasonable to expect them to stop using solutions like Dropbox or Google Drive, but it is important to be prepared and to adopt solutions that can monitor and control how popular cloud applications are employed.

While Millennials may not yet be well-versed in security threats, they are up-to-speed on the latest trendy devices and wearables. In today’s complex business environment, the number of devices employees are using continues to increase tenfold and the growing number of unprotected endpoints can often make IT security feel like a frenzied game of whack-a-mole. As the security perimeter continues to expand into a world of new devices, networks and applications, companies need to think about a more holistic approach to their security strategy in order to enable effective threat detection and response in a cloud generation.

Beyond monitoring cloud apps, organizations need to implement multifactor authentication (MFA) to eliminate the risk of hijacked credentials. This allows for extra layers of protection for companies by setting up security measures that tighten employee access, requiring a password, security token and biometrics to prove your identity. This is particularly important as the organization adopts cloud applications; the reason is that stolen credentials are one of the most common mechanisms for data theft. Using MFA is fast becoming a popular practice for cloud apps, such as Office 365, Salesforce.com and ServiceNow.

While prevention is critical to a strong security education, it’s also essential that companies recognize breaches can’t always be avoided. When a breach does occur, most companies have traditional incident-response systems and processes they hope will identify the information that was exposed. However, in today’s generation of cloud apps and services, organizations must also understand the impact of incidents when third-party cloud applications and services are involved. This will require a clear understanding of the language in the agreements with their cloud providers as well as appropriate technologies that provide a proper level of visibility and control over data in these cloud applications and services.