Don’t be the weak link in the chain

The cyber land­scape has evolved dra­mat­i­cal­ly in recent years – not in the form of new threat vec­tors but rather the sophis­ti­ca­tion of bad actors. Organ­ised crime has now firm­ly extend­ed from phys­i­cal to vir­tu­al, and hack­ers are increas­ing­ly astute at adopt­ing mod­ern key tech­nolo­gies, such as adver­sar­i­al machine learn­ing net­works that trick auto­mat­ed defences.

Phish­ing and ran­somware con­tin­ue to dom­i­nate the threat envi­ron­ment, but amidst the rise of cloud and grow­ing lay­ers of soft­ware con­tribut­ing to prod­ucts, the greater com­plex­i­ty is cre­at­ing more oppor­tu­ni­ties for cyber­crim­i­nals to exploit. Some are even devel­op­ing their own val­ue chains employ­ing, for instance, pro­fes­sion­al call cen­tres in ran­somware schemes as a means of ‘cus­tomer care’.

“Cyber­crim­i­nals love exploit­ing com­plex­i­ty,” says Jochen Haller, head of infor­ma­tion secu­ri­ty at IONOS, Europe’s biggest host­ing provider, which also offers an enter­prise-lev­el cloud infra­struc­ture plat­form. “We are essen­tial­ly now see­ing vir­tu­alised oper­at­ing sys­tem stacks inside vir­tu­al oper­at­ing sys­tem stacks next to con­tainer­ised oper­at­ing sys­tem stacks on met­al.”

Sup­ply chains have become so glob­al and inter­con­nect­ed that every busi­ness is now respon­si­ble not only for their own secu­ri­ty but also that of their cus­tomers and sup­pli­ers. This is a par­tic­u­lar chal­lenge for SMEs, which typ­i­cal­ly are not experts in cyber­se­cu­ri­ty and tend to be fur­ther behind larg­er, bet­ter-resourced com­pa­nies when it comes to dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion.

“Organ­i­sa­tions have to keep track of each and every piece of soft­ware,” Haller adds. “And if they lose track of one of them, that’s when the bad actors see their advan­tage. An attack­er only has to be lucky once to find an unpatched vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and get in.”
A sil­ver lin­ing of the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic is that it act­ed as a pow­er­ful accel­er­ant of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, with busi­ness­es forced to adapt to sur­vive. In a research study con­duct­ed by YouGov on behalf of IONOS, almost two-thirds of UK SMEs said the cri­sis pos­i­tive­ly impact­ed their dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion jour­ney.

Fol­low­ing the pan­dem­ic, dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion con­tin­ues to be cen­tral for SME busi­ness mod­els, with three-quar­ters say­ing it is impor­tant to their future via­bil­i­ty. Aside from being vis­i­ble on the inter­net, secu­ri­ty and data pro­tec­tion was not­ed as the top focus area for SMEs imple­ment­ing dig­i­tal mea­sures.

“The biggest chal­lenge for SMEs is com­ing from the jour­ney into the dig­i­tal world and fac­ing its secu­ri­ty chal­lenges. But if you don’t jump on you will be left behind,” says Haller. “Com­pa­nies that fail to digi­tise will effec­tive­ly select them­selves out of sup­ply chains. If you want to com­pete in glob­al and even local mar­kets, you just have to do it.“
SMEs lack­ing in-house exper­tise can be just as dig­i­tal­ly savvy and secure as big glob­al cor­po­ra­tions, thanks to cloud providers expe­ri­enced in man­ag­ing crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture. “It’s impor­tant to choose a provider that fits your needs,” says Haller. “The typ­i­cal user jour­ney starts just with email or a domain, but you might also require e‑shops, online mar­ket­ing tools or even full-fledged servers at a lat­er growth stage. IONOS cov­ers this entire jour­ney, from pro­fes­sion­al back-up solu­tions up to our high-end cloud infra­struc­ture plat­form.”

A strong cloud host­ing provider can offer more secu­ri­ty than any indi­vid­ual com­pa­ny can on its own, as well as tak­ing on crit­i­cal secu­ri­ty tasks such as patch­ing and soft­ware updates. Small com­pa­nies need to focus on their core busi­ness objec­tives, which makes out­sourc­ing day-to-day main­te­nance of their cloud ser­vices an attrac­tive option. IONOS pro­vides a vet­ted pool of qual­i­fied experts through its part­ner net­work.

“There will always be crim­i­nals. Secu­ri­ty and pri­va­cy will con­tin­ue to merge, not in terms of com­pli­ance but the tech­ni­cal, organ­i­sa­tion­al part. As cyber­crim­i­nals become even more sophis­ti­cat­ed, we on the defence side also have to con­tin­u­ous­ly improve and adopt the best tech­nolo­gies. Greater com­plex­i­ties with­in sys­tems mean humans can no longer do it alone. Automa­tion will be key, sup­port­ed by skilled peo­ple who can think about how to design this automa­tion and to con­tin­u­ous­ly main­tain and improve it.”

For more infor­ma­tion, vis­it IONOS.co.uk

Pro­mot­ed by IONOS