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All along the Watchtower: How this Solution Can Help Manage Digital Risk

Every single day, over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created. The Internet of Things (IoT) world of connected, smart devices is growing rapidly, and there’s estimated to be 26 smart objects per human on earth by 2020, with most of these devices being used in factories, business and healthcare. The enterprise application market could reach $288 billion by 2024.

This exponential growth in data and technology helps companies increase efficiency, achieve new goals and reduce costs. However, these global trends also come with more complex digital risks that require more sophisticated threat intelligence strategies. Building a watchtower is one of the best ways of monitoring and protecting your business’ data and future.

What Is Digital Risk?

There are many sources of digital risk. While most risks revolve around data collection, storage and delivery, breaking the risks down into additional categories can help you build an informed threat intelligence strategy.

• Data: This category includes any cyberattacks, leakages, theft or other breaches of sensitive data. It can include items such as customers’ financial data or proprietary company code.
• Infrastructure: This covers everything that keeps your company running from on-site, automated manufacturing processes to hardware and software.
• Personnel: While a thorough interview process can help you hire employees who will adhere to company risk management strategies, negligence or theft of employee credentials represent a risk. Also, there’s always a chance that an upset employee could turn on the company and expose it to more digital risk.
• Supply chain: Working with third parties could expose you to more risk since they may have different security protocols.

How Can You Protect Against These Risks?

An active approach to risk management is always a better approach than waiting for something to happen. Most threat intelligence plans will outline potential risks as well as solutions to various scenarios. While you can never plan for all possible issues, this will help you be more prepared if something does happen.

The old approach used to advocate building a wall that cuts off potential intruders, but this is next to impossible with the amount of data and tech that companies use. Instead, building a watchtower is a much more comprehensive and manageable approach to management. The watchtower should be able to automatically collect data from multiple sources, analyze it using advanced data science and machine learning and be able to incorporate protocols for mitigating different situations.

How Do Threat Intelligence Platforms Help?

Fortunately, there are companies that specialize in developing customized threat intelligence solutions, also called “watchtowers” to help your company defend its valuable assets. Solution providers should have the capability to automatically collect, monitor and analyze different data sources to identify and resolve potential threats. These platforms should at least:

• Analyze host infrastructure and domain SSL certificates
• Investigate content and WHOIS records
• Check configuration of DNS MX records and name services.

Digital risk can negatively impact a company much more quickly than more traditional risks, so it’s important to develop a comprehensive threat intelligence management strategy. Watchtowers offer a compelling solution given its robust capabilities to analyze large amounts of data and adapt to different situations. Working with an experienced and dedicated security company can help you keep pace with the evolving, technologically-driven world.