Digital Transformation Strategy Essentials Part 3: Adaptive Security and Compliance

As digital technology platforms continue to become the norm for today’s enterprises, digital customer experience wouldn’t be satisfactory without an assurance that the user’s data will be secured. In this third installment of our Digital Transformation Strategy Essentials series, we’ll focus on adaptive security and compliance, and why it is important to have an adaptive defense strategy when it comes to protecting your digital assets.

In the past, we have witnessed how hackers were able to collect data on about 1.5 million enterprise clients of Verizon Enterprise Services. The United States Democratic National Committee also fell victim to hacking as thousands of its emails were published on Wikileaks. But arguably the biggest attack on data security is the double whammy on Yahoo, which caused an impact on not less than 1.5 billion customer accounts on two separate occasions, one in August 2013 and again in late 2014. Both Yahoo security breaches were discovered in 2016.

These events show how data breaches have become common in recent years, and they are expected to escalate using more advanced methods in the future. Security breaches are not just breaches. They are, in fact, attacks that disrupt business operations and cost millions of dollars in lost profits and damage control activities. And as attacks become highly sophisticated, developing more advanced security measures should be a strategic priority for all digital businesses.

Trust as Business Currency

Analyst firm, Forrester, recently stated in their predictions report, “In 2017, the basic fabric of trust is at stake as CEOs grapple with how to defend against escalating, dynamic security and privacy risk.” For this reason, analysts foresee enterprises investing heavily on security this year and beyond. “Firms allocated 10% of their security technology budget to data security in 2016, and 44% of firms have plans to increase spending here from 2016 to 2017,” adds Forrester.

Forrester also stated in its report that between 2016 and 2017, more than half of the enterprises that experienced data security breaches had increased their spending on security after the event. For example, Forrester reported, “A PwC study of UK firms found that cybersecurity spending rose from an average of £3 million in 2015 to £6.2 million in 2016. On the other end of the spectrum, J.P. Morgan Chase has doubled its budget to $500 million, while Bank of America’s CEO has gone from committing $400 million in 2015 to a blank-check approach in 2016.”

Notably, cybersecurity budgets are growing, but they vary considerably among different companies and industries. While one could argue that every security technology investment is data security, it is important to determine whether the money is worth spending on a particular service or technology.

Toward Adaptive Security Architecture

Gartner predicted that among the trends in digital transformation strategies for 2017 is adaptive security architecture. As digital technology platforms and application architectures evolve, security also needs to be more fluid and adaptive. Relying on perimeter defense and rule-based security alone is not enough, especially for today’s modern enterprises that are increasingly adopting cloud-based services and open APIs for clients and consumers to integrate with their systems easily.

While traditional detection and blocking methods cannot be dismissed, adaptive security architecture dictates that companies must focus on automating security and compliance at a scale to ensure that sensitive information is stored securely, without compromising convenience or accessibility.

Security at Every Layer

Adaptive security is all about pervasive risk monitoring and providing a continual response to threats at every layer of your IT infrastructure. It includes access control and network security, vulnerability management, endpoint protection, and basic monitoring. And because no single product can provide a single comprehensive security solution, it is important to consider using service providers that deliver an extensive and interoperable security solution for your data security requirements.

Security best practices are built into every layer of the Caspio platform. First and foremost, Caspio is built on best-of-breed technologies, including Microsoft SQL Server, utilizing its hardened security measures to protect data. It operates on the most advanced cloud infrastructure, Amazon Web Services, which is recognized to be a leader in cloud security. Caspio employs an array of security and monitoring capabilities offered by AWS. Additionally, the Caspio staff are regularly trained and updated on security practices to ensure they remain informed and alert about potential threats.

Caspio also offers data security tools to its users so they can build better and more secure applications. These tools include application authentication capability, which can use Caspio’s encrypted password management technology, internal SAML-compatible ID Providers such Active Directory, or 3^rd party ID Services such as Google authentication. Caspio authentication enables unlimited roles in applications with record-level and field-level security. In addition, customers can use IP-based access controls for applications. Detailed access reports are available to customers to monitor usage patterns of their protected applications.

Caspio’s specialized platform editions go even further to ensure customers can meet the security or data privacy requirements of their industry. These editions include:

• HIPAA- Compliant Platform and BAA agreements for Healthcare industry
• FERPA- Compliant Platform for Education industry
• GovCloud Platform Edition for US Federal, State, and Local entities
• EU Compliance Edition for European Union customers requiring compliance with EU Data Protection Regulations

Caspio’s architecture and design are flexible and scalable enough to empower users around the world to create business applications with the necessary data security measures needed for a digital business. You can learn more about Caspio’s security and compliance capabilities for the enterprise in Caspio’s Enterprise Editions.

Read more about Digital Transformation Strategy Essentials in our previous blog entries:

• Part 1: Digital Technology Platforms
• Part 2: Digital Customer Experience