Security

To Stay Safe, Businesses Turn to Automation, Employee Training

Seeking greater threat awareness for IT teams and frontline staff, organizations find success combining advanced technology with information.

Ryan Petersen

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Ryan has been a magazine and newspaper editor for 21 years, with the last 15 covering a variety of bases for CDW’s family of tech magazines. As Editor in Chief, he works on developing editorial strategy and is always on the lookout for new writing talent and sharing great stories with the IT world. In his spare time, Ryan enjoys spending time with his family, biking and obsessively following Iowa Hawkeye sports and Cubs baseball.

The range of cybersecurity risks that businesses face today are increasingly complex, and they demand a response that is sophisticated and fundamentally sound. Unfortunately, organizations are struggling on two key fronts.

The first is the volume of threats. Basic security tools can detect anomalous network activity, but the sheer number of warnings protects the bad guys by distracting IT teams. Businesses can’t keep up.

“I don’t even know how many alerts we had per day, I’ll put it that way,” Chris Barnes, CTO at Howard, a Dallas-based accounting firm, told us. “The next thing you know, you’re not even looking at the alerts anymore, and that’s a problem.”

Companies such as Howard are responding with managed threat detection and response solutions, which provide around-the-clock monitoring of threats, and security automation, which leverages artificial intelligence to screen out noncritical events.

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The Security Battle for Your Workers

Threat actors are also waging battle on a second front: employees. Attackers have become depressingly adept at fooling workers into giving up their credentials, opening emails infected with viruses or taking some other adverse actions.

Employees lack information. For example, according to research by cybersecurity firm Proofpoint, only 55 percent of workers know that an email can be made to look like it’s coming from someone other than the true sender. The other 45 percent are easy targets.

Businesses are not defenseless, however. To fight back, they must empower their people with training to recognize phishing attacks when they see them, equip their IT teams with tools that allow them to focus on what matters, conduct regular security assessments with a qualified third party, pay attention to security hygiene and develop a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy.

That’s a lengthy to-do list. But organizations that achieve each item on the list will give hackers a fight they’d rather avoid.

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