Cybersecurity

Protect your Agency’s Assets With a Security Management System


With the proliferation of shadow IT and other cloud services required to run businesses, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to protect a company’s intellectual assets at scale. Fortunately, online security management system make it easier to maintain control of these assets.

Let’s take a look at today’s security realities as well as the necessary elements of an effective security management system.

Google Security Management Blog ImageThere’s a Reason Businesses Don’t Feel Secure

Having so many services to manage and maintain complicates efforts to ensure the right controls and policies are in place to keep company IP, data, and customer information secure.

“The average IT organization has to manage 1,427 cloud services.”

– Skyhigh, 2017

Both on-premise and on-the-cloud patchwork systems are becoming tougher to manage and easier for attackers to target. What’s more, hackers are changing tactics all the time. Without an army of security pros, it’s hard to keep up. For example:

  • 91% of attacks start with a phishing email.
  • 66% of malware is installed by malicious emails and attachments.
  • 90% of reported security breaches are caused by employee negligence, extortion and external threats.

By some estimates, there are about 5,000 daily security threat events being generated in security operation centers. On an average day, centers can only reach about 2,500 of these.

Neglecting roughly half of security threat events is simply not good enough. Your company reputation can be irreparably harmed by the loss of critical information. Something as easy as an employee opening an attachment in a malicious email could lead to massive revenue loss.

“30% of data breaches are caused by employees due to a lack of internal controls.”

– Online Trust Alliance, 2016

This is no longer just an admin-level problem. It’s a broad corporate issue.

By creating a security management system, corporations can give admins and users the controls they need to identify and address security threats.

Security Management System Unboxed

Resource-savvy businesses use a security management system to surface the most worrisome security concerns. The center gives them security analytics, actionable insights in a single unified place, and best-practice recommendations.

The smart move? Create a security management system that oversees your employee modules and applications, including individual file sharing, email and IM, and presentation and word processing apps.

The three pillars of a modern security system are as follows:

1. Prevention

Prevention is the key to security health. To maintain it, your management system should help admins improve their security domain by setting rules and configurations to address each vulnerability and keep it from turning into a threat.

This part of the management system displays what security rules have been enabled for which organization. For example, it can show you the number of domains and mobile devices that have enabled email forwarding and two-factor authentication. It reviews such things as:

  • Email
  • File sharing
  • Devices
  • Users
  • Instant messaging
  • Groups

2. Detection

If a vulnerability is discovered, companies want to quickly get to the information that matters so they can focus on solving issues.

An effective dashboard can alert admins and IT decision makers to suspicious device activity, demonstrate how spam and malware are targeting organization users, and deliver security effectiveness metrics. It also alerts admins to which users are being targeted by phishing to help head off a potential attack.

Security dashboards should detect and give insights to:

  • File exposure
  • Authentication
  • Encryption
  • Email delivery
  • Spam and malware classification
  • User perception

3. Remediation

And lastly, you need remediation capabilities that allow analysts and admins to investigate and research a particular security threat and remediate it in real time.

If you find an issue you need to address, your system should provide recommendations for how to remediate or change a troublesome configuration.

You Need Information, Not an Army

A security management system can significantly increase the effectiveness of your existing admin team, decrease the level of employee-caused data breaches, and protect your company’s sensitive information.

Want to learn more? Click here to access our on-demand actionable security insights for G Suite webinar.

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