Enabling Cybersecurity with Engineering
“As Chief Security Officer, I preside over 11,000 employees and 450 client organizations from all over the world, and my job is to guarantee and reassure them that they can trust that their data and assets are secure. Without trust, change cannot be embraced. Security is not (only) about technology, and not (only) about prevention. Rather, it is a founding principle across all domains that allows people and organizations to push forward in their digital transformation journeys. Digital transformation, as well as business development, depend on security just like humans depend on air. Both are invisible, yet without them there can be no evolution, no life. Cybersecurity is about ensuring that the right measures are in place, not only to prevent threats, but above all to support and enable transformation and growth, thus protecting all those promises that our future holds.” – Igor Kranjec, Chief Security Officer, Engineering Group
A Few Words
The world we live in is changing at an ever-increasing rate. New technological frontiers have made it possible to connect everything and everyone. This transformation is driving innovation forward at an unprecedented speed, introducing improvements in the way we live and work that until recently seemed unimaginable. This new world of opportunities, however, must also be protected, and only the right combination of experience, skills and technologies can ensure a secure and controlled digital transformation journey.
According to leading international analysts, the number of serious enterprise-level computer threats has increased exponentially in recent years, and this number is only expected to grow moving forward. This trend poses an important question for companies looking to take on digital transformation: how can I make my digital world a safe place for my customers, employees and partners?
A long-standing leader in the provision of comprehensive Cybersecurity solutions, resources and services, Engineering can guarantee the continuous security of any IT ecosystem. Cybersecurity must be a critical element of any digitalization strategy, and companies that choose Engineering gain a reliable partner capable of training employees, monitoring networks, safeguarding data and preventing cyber threats before they have an impact on operations or business.
With over 550 Cybersecurity specialists worldwide, and 4 proprietary data centers that oversee 21,000 servers and more than 10 petabytes of customer data, Engineering Group boasts one of the leading Cybersecurity centers of competence of its kind. Moreover, our organization’s continuous investment in people and research ensures that our offering and approach to Cybersecurity evolves along with the complexity of the world around us. As a result, we have the vision, resources and experience required to protect and enable your organization as it embraces digital transformation.
What is Cybersecurity?
Within the digital transformation sphere, Cybersecurity can be defined as the set of technologies, skills, processes and structures required to protect data, applications and infrastructure from unauthorized access, damage or attacks. The importance of adopting Cybersecurity goes hand in hand with the exponential growth of the quantity and value of data available, including code, content, images, infographics, videos, signals, etc. The digital transformation paradigm places two fundamental and diverging imperatives on companies:
- First, to enable and grow the business, implementing online services designed to interact securely with employees, customers and partners, and ensuring that their structure is efficient and agile enough to respond quickly to the fluctuating needs and requirements of the market.
- To protect the business from breaches and unauthorized access, leveraging control systems designed to safeguard data wherever it may be stored, including on mobile devices and laptops, in data centers, on the Cloud, etc.
In this context, Cybersecurity becomes a key component in the definition of a solid risk management strategy and an important enabling factor for the digital transformation process. Going beyond IT security programs, there is, in fact, a structured set of technologies, skills and processes designed to prevent, detect and react effectively against attacks on people, data, applications and infrastructure.
Why Does It Matter?
In order to protect and, at the same time, to enable an organization’s digital ecosystem to evolve, a company must implement a holistic approach to Cybersecurity, the strategy of which is defined by three key dimensions: people, processes and technologies. It is believed that 90% of cyberattacks take advantage of people to gain access to key corporate assets. An effective Cybersecurity strategy must therefore be an integral part of the organization and should consist of established processes for the prevention, interception and mitigation of an attack.
The prevention of a cyberattack starts from a 360° analysis of the company’s virtual and physical world. This inventory must take into consideration the risks related to:
- Material goods, which include not only physical devices and networks, but also smart buildings, logistics and smart factories;
- Intangible assets, which are often more at risk than material goods, and which include product design information, manufacturing process data, financial reports, patents and trade secrets, marketing plans, pricing strategies, rollout deadlines, etc.
An inventory of such assets is, however, only the first step of a verification process that must never stop. Continuously evolving connectivity creates an intrinsically dynamic level of vulnerability, which in turn imposes the need for a dynamic identification and classification of the organization’s critical assets, in order to be able to set priorities for what should be protected. In an effective prevention strategy, one of the most important barriers to attack also relies on the continuous training of staff regarding a company's data and security standards. It is every company’s responsibility to promote a cyber-aware culture that empowers all employees, even those who are not IT experts, to understand and feel that they are an integral part of the corporate Cybersecurity process.
The interception of a cyberattack relies on the prompt interpretation of a suspicious series of data or information, the anomaly or importance of which must be immediately recognized. It is therefore imperative that security teams have access to a variety of cyber-threat intelligence sources that continuously monitor, aggregate and expose data in a way which can be easily managed in terms of relevance, quality and timeliness. An even more important factor consists of providing access to information contextualized for the specific company and its activities, along with the capability to take appropriate action from those bases when needed. Cyberattacks are mitigated based on two key criteria: efficiency and speed. Teams must be prepared to react, know who to contact and be able to quickly identify which part of the company must be isolated.
Digital transformation offers an endless number of benefits and opportunities for manufacturers and non-manufacturers alike. But regardless of the industry in which a business operates, the success of any digitalization strategy relies on the security and reliability of the precious data, assets, people and infrastructure that are exposed to the digital world in the process. This is where Cybersecurity comes to play.
