Know how Digital Transformation is creating new security risks

[Nabanita1]

With the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, the Digital transformation is on the rise and so are cybersecurity risks. Demand for digital transformation services and technologies increased almost immediately after the first statewide stay-at-home order was enacted in March 2020, speeding the adoption of many digital technologies by several years. But many of the digital innovations that support these services arrived with attendant cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

According to Richard Peters, principal of UHY Consulting, a management consulting firm, there have been a large uptick in vulnerabilities within cloud infrastructure, web applications, APIs, and microservices. These newer technologies that are empowering the digital transformation movement are creating new attack surfaces. "Companies can use hundreds if not thousands of SaaS providers. SaaS vendors range in their own levels of security maturity. There has also been a rise in shadow IT, specifically SaaS tools that individuals or business units purchase on their own without the knowledge of IT or security teams," said Eric Christopher, co-founder and CEO of Zylo, a SaaS management firm.

A cure already exists

Organizations can mitigate these emerging security challenges. When considering security for digital transformation, keep patch management, third parties, application security, and security automation at top of mind. Leech offers these recommendations:

• Put patch management in place for public cloud workloads. When Microsoft's Patch Tuesday rolls around, assess whether those patches are relevant to you and how much time you have before you need to start patching.
• Extend your enterprise security strategies out to third-party cloud service providers. Make sure they have the answers to your security team's questions.
• Move what you already secure well over to the cloud first. Improve security for the rest so that when you use it in a public cloud environment, you don't amplify existing security issues.
• Consider concepts such as compliance as code and policy as code. They allow you to automate the security protection capabilities you need to protect the public cloud.
• For more information on HPE OEM and how to engage, read here.

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Nabanita Maji
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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