Security in the age of digital technology

There is a need for a stronger security culture, especially in the cyber security domain

By IBM
Updated: Sep 18, 2015 08:49:07 AM UTC
cams
The security systems provide capabilities to manage identities and access, protection of data across mobile devices and cloud services as well as a mechanism to provide visibility or actionable security intelligence across cloud and enterprise environments

Image: Shutterstock

The other day I lost my phone at a stadium where I went to participate in a badminton tournament. While driving back home, I was trying to recollect what information I had stored in the phone and assess the impact of the loss. That was a difficult. But the revelation for me was how deeply the new digital technologies we know as ‘SMAC’—or CAMS for Cloud, Analytics, Mobile and Social—are transforming enterprises and have started impacting our personal lives as well. In this post, I’ll try to discuss why we should get serious about adding the significant ‘S’ of security to CAMS whether it is for business or personal use.

CAMS & the enterprise In this era of computing, enterprises are looking to reinvent and transform themselves by building new dynamic business processes that blur the digital and physical worlds. Businesses want to build deep, strategic relationships with their customers and enterprise-to-enterprise relationships where the ‘customer is for life’.

They are investing in mobile technologies specifically to create individualised, tailored experiences based on each customer’s situation or anticipated needs. On the other side, as customers gain more power over the business via social media, their expectations keep rising and their tolerance keeps decreasing. The most important customer-related initiative that modern enterprises are investing in is analytics, which gives them a complete understanding of the real needs of current and future customers.

There are significant technology trends and changes needed in architecture, design, method and implementation to build these new solutions that involve using traditional systems of records and leveraging systems of engagement to create new markets or  insights. The challenge is about transitioning from a transaction-oriented, data-centric system to a collaborative, interaction-oriented and user-experience centric system. To work with the older systems, the users need to understand and learn the system but in the new era, the cool and groovy systems will learn the user.

CAMS Enterprise Architecture & Security
The CAMS solution needs to connect and make sense of the variety of data from systems of engagements and the legacy data from systems of records. The systems of interaction provide secure cloud connectivity and data from sensors and devices. The systems of insight (analytics) help derive, discover and deliver these insights from the data. The systems of development and operations leverage the cloud for continuous development, deployment and scalability of these new enterprise applications. The insights are monetised by delivering through employee or customer devices leveraging mobile technologies that reinvent customer relationships by engaging them anywhere and anytime where the context is relevant. The top challenge or barrier is to manage the security and compliance for the end-to-end solution. The solution should manage identities and access to the huge volume of sensitive data and cloud resources, so that only authorised users can securely access the data and cloud services. The security systems provide capabilities to manage identities and access, protection of data across mobile devices and cloud services as well as a mechanism to provide visibility or actionable security intelligence across cloud and enterprise environments.

CAMS and the individual
Businesses are leveraging the access to massive computing capabilities on the cloud than ever before to analyse and deliver individualised experiences on their customers’ mobile phones. We as customers then share our experience with our social network and friends.  These are changing the way we do business as well as starting to impact our personal lives. While cloud and analytics are the elements at the core of CAMS, mobile is the edge through which customers interact and social connects things together.

I had a couple of banking apps installed on my mobile that allowed me to interact with my bank and do easy transactions on the go.  With more than 50% of Indian ecommerce business happening through mobile now and with many of the major players going ‘app only’ or providing additional discounts through app, I also had couple of retail apps on my mobile. All my contacts, pictures and videos were continuously being backed up into the cloud in my Google account.  Apart from my personal messaging like Whatsapp and email services (Yahoo, Gmail), I also had my company email, and messaging app as well installed on my mobile. I was also social with my Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts on my mobile. Recently I also picked up fitbit—a fitness product. There was also an app that I had installed on my mobile for this wearable technology device. The device synced with the app on my mobile to interact with the data on my cloud such as the number of steps walked, quality of sleep, steps climbed, and other personal metrics.

Now just imagine, if my lost mobile had got into the hands of a bad guy, he now would have access to not only my personal information, documents, pictures & videos, bank details, my enterprise data but also information about my friends and family from the social apps on my mobile. The hacker could now not only know my buying preference but also my eating habits as well as my sleeping patterns.

Staying safe on the social & mobile cloud
The first thing I did was to report the loss of the device to the nearest police station as well as my telecom service provider to block the SIM and the device (IMEI) number. Fortunately for me, the mobile was secured and managed by my company’s mobile device management (MDM) solution which enforced strict security policies and provided a robust way to secure the content on my phone. I also reported the loss to the company, so that I could use the MDM capability to remotely wipe any confidential content and lock the device as needed. One of the simplest and the effective thing that I believe I did to secure my device was to use different and complex passwords (atleast 12 characters long with alphabets, numbers and special characters) to secure my device as well as used different passwords for my accounts and apps. No two accounts shared a common password. So even if the hacker has access to infinite computing resources, it would take him ages to get to crack a single password. So in this era of blurring boundaries of digital and physical world of CAMS, though I did lose a physical asset, I’m happy that I did not lose any of my digital assets.

We can see that CAMS is becoming a powerful transformation tool impacting businesses and individuals. As Indians, we lack a strong security culture especially in the cyber security domain, where every individual has the potential to be both a defender and a victim. Just the same way that we shouldn’t drive vehicles without buckling our seat belts, we should not venture to be smart and social without taking some of the basic precautions to stay safe online. Let security be the seat belt that allows you to drive faster on the CAMS(S) highway.

- By Sreekanth Iyer, a Cloud Security Architect for IBM Cloud (CTO Office) at IBM India Software Lab. He is also an IBM Master Inventor and an Open Group Certified Distinguished Architect.

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.

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