The past year has challenged most organizations. They’ve had to extend their infrastructure to support remote working and to open multiple channels to engage and service their clients and business partners. Many of these innovations can present inherent security risks, as businesses are forced to quickly adapt their IT infrastructure to this new world.

To secure their environments, organizations must develop new digital capabilities and break down data silos. Data and information are the lifeblood of this transformation, but they also attract cybercriminal activity.

Traditional security approaches have failed us

It takes around six months to detect a data breach.

A hardened perimeter (privileged corporate network) is, at best, a psychological security blanket, but it’s no barrier against today’s different levels of cyberattacks. Siloed on-premises tools and datasets hinder visibility, correlation, and automation. Paradoxically, adding more tools typically makes you less secure due to compatibility issues and assumptions about your coverage.

Attackers can also get to you through your supply chain by exploiting the weakest link. By leveraging compromised software, they can gain access to other parts of the network through lateral movement. Stealing customer data is a goldmine, which they can sell on the dark web. It’s a sobering thought. We’re talking about the data your customers trust you to protect – the data that, if breached, could cost you dearly in penalties and fines.

On top of all of this—and perhaps because of it—the cost and number of breaches increase every year. As governments try to keep up, regulatory rules are constantly changing, and the cost of compliance increases as well. Over 1,000 regulatory bodies around the world release an average of 217 updates per day. Keeping up isn’t easy. You can’t be compliant without first being secure – everything starts with security.

Welcome to the security race

Organizations find themselves responsible for protecting an overlapping web of technologies, many of which they may not own or manage outright. With so many devices, different user groups, and so much corporate data, traditional perimeter-based security models simply can’t keep up with the sophistication of today’s threats. Neither can the traditional models provide the visibility and controls they need to secure today’s highly distributed and hyper-mobile environment.

We can no longer believe everything behind the corporate firewall will be safe.

Vulnerabilities for waste and recycling management companies

In the waste and recycling industry, access to your network is not only through workstations and servers. It’s through the devices we use for remote connectivity. We rely on our central ERP system, equip our trucks and drivers with mobile devices, leverage more and more IoT sensors, and interface with other systems like weighbridges.

On top of this, we have many of our employees working from home due to Covid regulations and we enable subcontractors to interface with our systems.

The number of nodes is growing and every node in the system is adding an extra risk and increases vulnerability. Systems and devices need continuous updating and patching. Our dependency on technology will only grow as we invest more in automating our processes. Think of self-service solutions, such as robotics, integration of camera feeds, cognitive services, and more.

A security model that better adapts to the reality we live in

Sophisticated attacks, a shortage of security professionals, and working with multiple vendors is the tough reality.

Attacks can come from anywhere, across any part of your organization. They are hard to find and difficult to fix. Siloed legacy tools work against you when you’re quickly trying to find threats. An endless list of alerts from a multitude of security-point products makes it difficult for your defenders to effectively link all of these moving parts at speed to contain a threat.

To meet these challenges, you need access to intelligent, automated, integrated security to close gaps in prevention, detection, and response across end-users, infrastructure, and cloud platforms. You need to free up your IT resources time to focus on keeping your organization safe.

Software as a service (or SaaS) offers many technical and business benefits and the Cloud platform provides a world-class service supporting greater business resilience in areas such as:

• Security
• Agility
• Scalability
• Business continuity
• Performance management

At AMCS the security of our clients’ data has always been paramount. We’ve invested significant resources in engineering security as a design principle into our application and delivering compliance with best-practice security standards such as SOC, GDPR, and PCI compliance. In partnership with Microsoft, we want to ensure our customers have the best protection and support available, building on Microsoft’s critical investment in better security for its cloud operations through the Azure platform.

Start planning now

With the world slowly opening after the pandemic we expect cybersecurity to become a top priority for most companies. It’s time to start working on your security plan to mitigate the security risks.

Leverage our Security Checklist to ensure your cyber resiliency