ACROSS THE WORLD TOGETHER FOR CYBER RESILIENCE
Every year since 2003, October has been dedicated to raising awareness about Cybersecurity, with many initiatives launched across the world. A Proclamation from the President of the United States opened this year Cybersecurity Awareness Month highlighting the impact of ransomware attacks that recently disrupted essential services and put the lives and livelihoods of Americans at risk. Compelling actions are required not only at a personal level, but also at the political one and from the perspective of the private sector.
As cybersecurity becomes a top priority in the political agenda of many countries, also the European Commission has recently issued the European Cybersecurity Act, which reinforces the European Agency for cybersecurity (ENISA) and establishes a cybersecurity certification framework for products and services. With the Directive on Security of Network and Information Systems (NIS Directive), currently under revision, Europe has introduced common tailored and risk-based EU certification schemes to make it easier for businesses to trade across borders and for users to understand the security features of the product or service.
A GUIDE TO SAFEGUARDING AGAINST RANSOMWARE
To understand the extent to which security threats have recently become a widespread challenge for businesses, Konica Minolta and Keypoint Intelligence IT have recently launched a global study that engaged IT decision-makers from all over the world.
The analysis highlights that employees from 37% of businesses experienced malware or other security threats due to conditions imposed during the pandemic. From the results of this research, a set of guidelines to lower ransomware risks was defined, comprising strategies as such as:
- Ensure endpoint security
- Verify employees’ awareness of risks connected to phishing
- Be aware of unsanctioned applications
- Be ready to recover.
The full description of Konica Minolta’s approach to cybersecurity is presented in the ebook Avoiding a Cyber-Hostage Crisis.
THE ADVANTAGES OF SECURITY RISK MANAGEMENT FOR CYBER RESILIENCE
Beyond best practices, the engagement of the right stakeholders, and the political commitment, cybersecurity can greatly benefit from the use of automated and cost-effective services that make businesses aware of their own security posture and provide them guidance to protect them.
At Konica Minolta Digital Services R&D we’ve been designing a Cyber Security Risk Management Service to enable cost-effective assessments of customers security posture, evaluate the potential impact of security risks to business processes, data, operations, products and services, and provide context-aware tailored results and recommendations to move forward.
“Thoroughly assessing security risks in complex IT and Operational Technology environments is usually a quite labour-intensive activity,” says Alessandro Manfredi, Senior Cybersecurity leader in our Rome laboratory. “So, it is most often slow, expensive and provides outcomes that highly varies depending on the experience of who performs it. A bit of automation can greatly reduce the effort, the uncertainty of experience-based evaluations and the propensity to errors or misjudgements”.
In addition, a service for wide-scale security risk management enables:
- Collection of anonymized data to leverage intelligence analyses in combination with knowledge of security incidents.
- Reduction of the dependency of results on the experience of who performs the assessment, although the role of the technology is to empower rather than replace them.
- Eventually, leverage intelligence-based metrics for risks evaluation emerging from relevant data rather than a mix of best practices and judgement.
SECURITY RISK MANAGEMENT AS A SERVICE
Our research teams developed a methodology based on best practices that enable Konica Minolta to offer Security Risk Management as a service to those companies, mostly small and medium businesses (SMBs), that need to evaluate their cyber risks on a context-specific basis, at the same time lowering the entry barrier to such fundamental steppingstone towards a good security practice and providing results-focused first on what is relevant for the customer.
A most common pain point of SMBs is that often they lack internal resources to deal with security issues or the expertise to get a complete view of their exposure to security risks and how to address them. Thanks to a strong service network in over 150 countries, Konica Minolta can support its customers to adhere to the appropriate regulations, safeguard their reputation and prevent the risks of security incidents and complexity of modern IT environments.
VISIT OUR OPEN LAB AND GET A DEMO
We take direction from the clients. We offer the right balance of automation and human supervision to provide small and medium business with affordable Managed Security Service.
Get in contact today to plan a visit to our Open Lab and learn more about our Security Risk Management Service.
Photo by Mario Gogh on Unsplash.
