To protect business continuity, it's crucial to assess your organisation's security risk, implement the right solutions, ensure company-wide changes and improve overall security culture.
CDW's approach to cyber security involves addressing the following key areas which are paramount to ensuring reduced risk.
Data
Organisations have an extraordinary amount of data. This sits across multiple platforms and applications and is expanding at an unprecedented rate. It's important to address the challenges surrounding data to help reduce the risk of a cyber breach.
Adopting the right approach is key, so understanding an organisation's data is imperative in allowing us to ensure the right solutions are implemented to help protect, monitor and restore availability. CDW's data-centric security methodology addresses these challenges by focusing on the following main areas:
- Discovery and classification
- Protection
- Monitoring
- Backup/archive/restoration/availability
Users
Most organisations have multiple types of users needing access to a variety of applications and data, using different methods across multiple platforms. This creates complex challenges with visibility, control, and protection for those users and their identities. Understanding users' activity allows us to define and implement the correct policies and protection for an organisation.
CDW's spproach to securing your users and their identities includes the following:
- Identification of the different user types that require access
- Understanding of the applications, systems and data they need to access and where from
- Understanding of the type of permissions required for access to applications and data
- Understanding of the different types of devices that should be used and by whom
- Identification of which systems, applications and devices require administration level of access
Devices
The landscape has changed rapidly over the last five years; the explosion of tablets, mobiles and IoT is causing IT departments major headaches and security challenges due to increased lack of visibility, control and protection for these devices. Understanding the different types of devices, their security posture, and having visibility across an organisation's IT infrastructure plays a large part in helping to reduce risk.
CDW's approach to enhancing security around devices includes the following:
- Identification of what devices are connecting/connected to an infrastructure
- Security risk of connected/connecting devices
- Understanding of the type of permissions required for access to applications and data
- Endpoint security review for corporate owned devices (laptops, tablets, mobiles)
- Secure access/remote access high level review
Applications
Your organisation will be using a range of applications, all of which bring their own security risks and challenges. New and evolving apps lead to new and evolving risks and compliance issues that need to be considered to ensure that organisations have complete visibility, protection and availability.
CDW's approach to delivering applications securely includes the following:
- Understanding of public-facing applications
- Understanding of internal applications
- Identification of sanctioned and unsanctioned applications being accessed on the internet (SaaS)
Infrastructure
IT Infrastructure is the backbone of many organisations. With the adoption of cloud computing, software-defined networking and micro-segmentation, there's never been a more important time to understand what threats and security risks lie within your infrastructure.
There are many types of infrastructure used to deliver services, and therefore it's important that all key areas are discussed as part of any approach to reducing the security risk within your IT environment.
Additional infrastructure considerations include:
- Visibility of connected devices and the risks associated with them
- Visibility of threats moving laterally within the infrastructure (on-premise/public cloud)
- Monitoring and compliance for public cloud infrastructure
How We Can Help
Find out how CDW can help you manage risk across your data, users, devices, applications and infrastructure. Simply email securityinfo@uk.cdw.com, call +44 207 791 6000 or contact your nearest CDW office.
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