As we continue to venture into uncharted territory in this digital transformation era, one company is cautious over developments. Fortinet – a known cyber security solutions provider – points out several flaws of the current modus operandi of big organisations as well as smaller, young firms. They are calling for these parties to strengthen their digital business infrastructure before serious threats emerge.

“The pace of technological change is relentless. Digital transformation without an equivalent security transformation is leaving Malaysian firms more vulnerable than ever as cybercrime is expected to continue rising. Businesses need to be protected from hackers, insider threats, and other malicious cyber-attacks,” says Anthony Lim, Principle Consultant for Fortinet SEA & HK.

Digital Transformation, Millennials, and Cyber Security

He adds that many businesses need to maintain a foothold among the new generation of millennials who are digital natives. This means more apps and online features to attract them. These big organisations would then typically outsource their software development toward smaller, younger firms. These young developers know the tastes of the new generation and can usually come up with great apps and online features. Indeed, one area where they’ve thrived is fintech; many banks now have mobile banking apps targeted for modern customers who don’t like to go to physical banks to carry out transactions.

While these firms can create apps that work well and attract the new age of consumers toward these organisations, there’s an inherent security issue with this method. A governance gap occurs, where these smaller firms may find the easiest way to do something, which may not be the safest. Quality assurance may also be an issue with younger firms who aren’t familiar with laws and regulations regarding security. This is especially risky in the aforementioned fintech industry; a bad line of code in a mobile bank app might be a huge security risk. This could affect hundreds of thousands of people.

Indeed, market research firm Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that cybercrime damages will cost the world USD6 trillion by 2021. This includes data damage and destruction, lost productivity, financial data theft, fraud, and reputation harm.

Building Better Digital Business Infrastructures

“Organisations in Malaysia must take tough measures to develop a robust cubersecurity strategy. They must ensure they are primed and ready to stop potential cyber-attacks. In today’s environment of highly sophisticated threats, it’s crucial that firms strengthen defences against cybercrime and remain a secure place to do business,” says Alex Loh, Country Manager for Fortinet Malaysia.

Fortinet thus identifies six security strategies for organisations to strengthen their digital business infrastructure:

1. Developing and maintaining a holistic security plan. This plan should encompass unified policies and protocols.
2. Build security plans around open standards to ensure cohesiveness even as plans and solutions evolve. Companies must reconsider solutions that stray too far from the bigger security picture.
3. There should be a single-pane-of-glass visibility for centralised management and orchestration. This should include an active inventory of all devices on the network as well as an assessment of their vulnerability. There should also be plans to patch, protect, and replace devices that pose a security threat. Security systems should also expand and adapt dynamically as network systems and resources shift and evolve.
4. Companies should share and correlate threat level intelligence, be it local or global. By doing so, every device can be assessed for vulnerability toward the latest cyber security threats. This includes SIEMs and sandboxing to detect complex or day zero threats.
5. Organisations should utilise open standards-based security framework to enable active coordination between devices to respond to threats. This needs to happen regardless of where it occurs across the distributed and elastic network.
6. Automation and artificial intelligence can be an ally for companies. There are only microseconds now between breach and compromise; manually responding to threats don’t suffice anymore in this day and age.

Fortinet hopes that businesses can have a security transformation along with this digital transformation we live in, especially with more aspects of our life impacted by the digital transformation.

For more information about Fortinet, you can click here.