"The threats will only get worse as we hurtle forward in the digital world"

Soma Tah

The increasing push towards digital is making the organizations rethink their security postures– for themselves and for their customers. Malav Kapadia, Director and Head of Indian Global Outsourcing Partners, BMC Software explains why the security concerns are rising so much in the digital era and suggests some best practices.

Why security is becoming a challenging issue in the digital era?

To compete in the digital era, organizations need to deliver new and innovative applications at a much faster pace and cope with exponentially growing data volume. Meeting these demands significantly increases complexity across the IT environment; and as mentioned; generating enormous amounts of data inspires hackers to become much bolder in their attempts to breach systems.

This is a pivotal time for IT leaders, who must find a way to meet soaring customer expectations, comply with the rapidly growing number of complex regulatory standards, and defend their IT infrastructure against the increasing volume and scope of cyber threats.

Is the existing security infrastructure ready/scalable enough to handle the pressure? If not, what do you suggest?

Many organizations are discovering that the tools, processes, and teams tasked with protecting their IT infrastructure are not able to cope effectively with the rising tide of attacks. Hackers are taking the path of least resistance, exploiting known vulnerabilities that simply haven’t been patched yet.

Statistically 80 percent of attacks exploit a known vulnerability, 99.9 percent of known vulnerabilities have a patch that is available and 1 in 3 data center servers is left unmanaged. Which leads to our view that diligence in server management and patching takes care of most of the security threats that are out there.

Could you please tell us how BMC solutions can help in this context?

BladeLogic Threat Director delivers a security solution that provides critical information to enable security and operations teams to effectively attack risk in their environment. It remains the only automation solution that natively integrates vulnerability scan data with operations data, which ultimately allows for automatic, enterprise-grade remediation.

Can you suggest some best practices for the organizations?

Ensure continuous compliance with a full cycle of system discovery, monitoring, remediation, and integrated change control.

Address risks based on policy and impact to ensure the most critical issues are fixed first, uptime is protected, and stability is maintained.

Protect your Blind Spots by identifying assets that are not monitored and potentially exposed, and automatically map dependencies.

The threats will only get worse as we hurtle forward in the digital world and the more proactively we deal will it the safer we make the environment for us and our customers and our consumers.