Information Protection Lies at the Heart of Digital Transformation

Digitization is creating new opportunities for organizations on one hand and on the other hand, it brings some serious threats in its wake. The increase in the number of large scale data breaches indicates that the growing digitization opens more avenues for cybercriminals to attack critical data
- Sanjay Rohatgi, President-Sales, India, Symantec

The insatiable need to remain agile and competitive has created a digitized environment with innumerable technologies and applications driving the operations of a company. These technologies have a pervasive influence on everything, from customer experience and enhanced productivity to improved management decisions. Ernst & Young captured five megatrends that are driving digital transformation across industries – namely, smart mobility, social networking, cloud computing, big data analytics, and accelerated technology adaptation. The convergence of these trends has driven an explosion in the number of endpoints in an enterprise, improving access to corporate information, both on-premise and outside the corporate network.

Digitization creates new opportunities not only for enterprises but also for cybercriminals. Year 2014 saw financial institutions, retail chains and large media companies at the receiving end of large-scale data breaches. According to the Lloyd’s Risk Index 2013, cyber risks have become the #1 technological risk and #3 business risk surpassing other business risks such as inflation and rapid technological changes.

Digital transformation in an era of mega breaches
Earlier the risks from malicious virus were a temporarily disabled computer and lost files. However, the recent Sony attack marked a turning point in the industry. Cyberattacks of this scale and nature trickle down to many aspects of the business. Employee productivity declines, customers are lost, operations can be severely hindered and the cost of restoring systems is high. That is just internal impact – companies also deal with lawsuits and non-monetized factors, like brand reputation. Enterprises are also increasingly facing targeted and multi-phased attacks, many of which can remain undetected for years - like the new pieces of malware, Regin.

Despite stepping up their information security measures, businesses in India continued to be an attractive target for cybercriminals, with 69 percent of targeted attacks in India focusing on large enterprises (as per Symantec Internet Security Threat Report 2014). The same report showed that 2013 was the year of the Mega Breach. Globally, there was a 62 percent increase in the number of data breaches from the previous year, resulting in more than 552 million identities exposed. The message is bold and clear: cybercrime remains a real and devastating threat to consumers and businesses alike. The size and scope of breaches is exploding, putting the trust and reputation of businesses at risk, and increasingly compromising consumers’ personal information – credit card numbers, medical records, passwords, bank account details, etc.
As enterprises continue their journey of digital transformation, they need to re-examine, re-think and possibly re-architect their security posture.

Sanjay Rohatgi,President -sales,India,Symantec

Need of the hour
With adversaries targeting all control points from the gateway to email to the endpoint, organizations now need to move from keeping malware out to finding the malware in their network, and responding to it quickly and efficiently. If it’s connected it must be protected, regardless of platform or device.
As organizations tread the path of digital transformation and come to realize the inevitability of a data breach, they need to shift their focus from protection only, to protection detection and response.
What organizations need is security across all control points working together, with incident response capabilities and global information intelligence, to beat the bad guys. Only then will they be able to truly reap the benefits of digital transformation.