Modern organizations deal with a multitude of cybersecurity challenges, which cost them a fortune to fortify. Testifying to this is a Cybersecurity Ventures report which states that cybercrime is expected to cost the world $10.5 trillion annually by 2025. To avoid such costs, organizations need to ensure robust infrastructure security; making IT infrastructure management a core tenet in the playbook of enterprise management.
This article outlines four key enterprise infrastructure powerplays that can help your organization stay ahead of threats, enabling proactive threat prevention and a swifter response to emerging dangers.
Secured IT Infrastructure Management: The Backbone of Modern Enterprises
Secured IT Infrastructure management is assuming increased importance because the modern enterprise infrastructure is more complicated than ever before. This is due to multiple trends noticed in recent times.
- The Rise of Remote Work: One such trend is the shift to remote work, which has taken endpoints outside of the monitored office environments to not just employees’ home networks but also to the public networks of the places where they work, including cafeterias, restaurants, and hotels. This has not only brought personal devices into the picture, but also increased the number of new devices employees need to purchase to connect to their office networks.
- Cloud Adoption: The growing popularity of cloud-based systems, alongside on-premises deployments, and hybrid models, introduces a diverse set of security challenges. All environments demand unique security focus.
- Evolving Cyber Threats: The cyber threat landscape is constantly evolving, with attackers developing increasingly sophisticated methods to exploit vulnerabilities. This means organizations need a proactive approach to security. With regulations are becoming stricter in response to the evolving threat landscape, enterprises are trying to implement robust security measures throughout their processes and infrastructure, further increasing the complexity of IT infrastructure management.
These trends underscore the critical need for enterprises to actively strategize and prioritize IT infrastructure management. A well-defined strategy ensures the overall health of the enterprise and strengthens its overall security posture, enabling it to navigate the rocky terrain of enterprise security and management.
4 Powerplays for a Threat-Ready Infrastructure
Following are some of the key IT infrastructure management practices that can equip your enterprise to outsmart IT threats and enable smooth infrastructure management.
A Solid Foundation as the First Line of Defense
To lay a solid foundation, enterprises first must invest in hardware that is built with security features in mind, such as hardware-based encryption and secure boot capabilities. They should use well-established, regularly updated secure software that limits exposure to commonly exploited vulnerabilities.
Apart from this, implementing a robust intrusion detection and prevention system to monitor network traffic for suspicious activity can also help ensure a solid security foundation. This system constantly scans for and identify potential threats.
Threat Intelligence for Proactive Security
Advanced enterprise infrastructure management goes beyond just remediation; it focuses on proactive threat detection and remediation. Enterprises aiming to achieve advanced enterprise infrastructure management leverage cyber threat intelligence tools that help identify and quantify cyber-risk and prioritize vulnerabilities based on their potential impact. It helps prepare organizations with the skills required to make threat hunting more accurate and organizations more aware of the evolving threat landscape.
Strong Incident Response Muscle Memory with Automated Actions
Organizations having a well-rehearsed incident response plan and infrastructure can equip their security teams to respond swiftly and effectively to a cyberattack. This minimizes damage and expedites a return to normalcy.
Automation plays a central role in strengthening response systems. Tasks like threat identification and patch management can be automated to trigger immediate action. Imagine a tripwire being set off the moment a suspicious activity is detected, automated routines can swing into action, isolating infected devices, quarantining user accounts, and patching vulnerabilities. This frees up the IT security personnel, to focus on more complex tasks. They can delve into investigations, analyze the root cause of the attack, and orchestrate comprehensive recovery efforts. By automating the mundane, organizations empower their security teams to become cyber incident response ninjas, able to swiftly neutralize threats and minimize downtime.
Security by Design
Traditional IT infrastructure management relied on reactive measures, such as patching vulnerabilities after they were discovered.
‘Security by Design’ flips this approach on its head. It’s a proactive strategy that integrates security considerations throughout the IT infrastructure, from the initial design phase to ongoing operations. This includes minimizing attack surfaces by implementing secure coding practices to reduce vulnerabilities in software development, enforcing least privilege access controls, which means granting users only the permissions they absolutely need, and automating security measures to ensure a consistent security posture.
Adhering to this principle helps enterprises improve compliance and keep security costs low.
Ensuring a Threat-Ready Enterprise Infrastructure
A robust enterprise infrastructure is the need of the hour for modern organizations. By implementing the four powerplays discussed in this article, organizations can secure their enterprises and proactively anticipate and thwart cyberattacks. This proactive approach not only minimizes the risk of breaches and data loss but also fosters business continuity and a stronger overall security posture.
BigFix Enterprise+ is an intelligent hybrid infrastructure automation offering that supports enterprises in implementing the above practices through offerings such as AI-driven runbook automation, which provides robust end-to-end incident remediation and task automation across the infrastructure and applications landscape; CyberFOCUS security analytics to discover, prioritize, and patch critical vulnerabilities; and BigFix lifecycle to maintain real-time visibility into your entire endpoint landscape.
Get your BigFix demo today and explore the capabilities of this enterprise offering.
