As enterprises adjust to the remote paradigms of doing business, working, and partnering, establishing a reliable and credible transaction framework becomes pivotal.
Millions of employees are working from home today, and amidst a continued Covid-19 crisis, these numbers are increasing exponentially. In such a scenario, a top concern for technology leaders is to keep remote network access to information systems doubly secure.
Likewise, a large number of customers too are preferring to shop and transact remotely and are preferring as few physical touch-points as possible.
Enterprises are conscious of the fact that this huge surge in remote access instances could give the opportunity to hackers and data thieves to exploit system vulnerabilities and gain unauthorized access to otherwise highly guarded datasets. Those organizations that are still in the midst of a digital transformation journey, need even better authentication mechanisms to create trusted relationships with users.
These new-age operating models have put unparalleled challenges on enterprises, pushing for the need for a holistic and more advanced cyber-resilience.
Perhaps the best way to deal with these newfound challenges is to build a foundation of trust in interactions with internal as well as external stakeholders. While this starts with protecting the digital users, assets, and data of an organization, ‘digital trust’ solutions can help build a rock-solid defense.
Secure and Seamless User Experience
In a hyper-competitive environment, where digital is rapidly becoming a mainstay and a growth accelerator, new threat surfaces are likely to cause massive disruption. Organizations are not only expected to take charge of a decisive cybersecurity strategy but also provide a smooth, seamless, and fully compliant experience to their users.
Users want the best of both worlds. They neither want to embroiled into a cumbersome authentication process nor want to see a situation where their credentials and accounts could get compromised.
This is clearly not an easy task as even large multinational companies have found it intriguing to balance a stringent digital security environment with a pleasing user experience.
Internally, the deployment of precise frameworks is critical for better cross-functional visibility across a distributed team environment. The security fabric, hence, needs to be well-supported by an integrated set of solutions that can reduce complexity and yet enable secure cross-functionality. All through this, businesses need to guard identities and accounts of their users.
Stay focused on priorities
While the concept of anytime-anywhere access could enable businesses to drive growth again, security, reliability, and integrity of the transactions would be paramount to build digital trust. For example, a company needs to define parameters on how quickly it wants to establish a trust level with someone who visits its website. If the organization deals in banking, it may want to check the legitimacy of the users before allowing them to navigate the website beyond a certain section. For other low-risk sectors, visitors may be scanned when they try to register themselves to access specific information.
Most importantly, through technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, device identification, and behavioral biometrics, organizations can perpetually focus on gathering meaningful insights and measure various behaviors to discover abnormal activity and digital identity risk. Insights about user behavior can also be gathered through automated chat bots.
Zero-trust security models could also be leveraged for certain critical application areas, which amounts to not trusting anything inside or outside the network borders by default and to control and verify every end-point before granting network access.
The IBM way
In today’s highly connected world, it is also important that digital trust solutions are based on open sources and frameworks. If you are not sure which way to go in enabling your digital trust journey, it is prudent to seek help from a trusted advisor.
Solution providers like IBM offer a robust portfolio of open solutions and services for data protection, identity, and access management, as well as for securing endpoints, networks, and applications. Based on a framework built on proven security models, these solutions are designed and tested to protect workflows, data, and applications on the fly, while also meeting compliance requirements.
Backed by AI and machine learning capabilities, IBM offers an integrated approach that helps businesses seamlessly establish digital trust across interfaces with all external and internal users, while keeping threats at bay.
Click here to know more about how to establish digital trust with IBM Security.