The Role Of CTO In Security

As cyberspace has evolved and matured, the role of the CTO has become increasingly demanding due to the business-damaging nature of cyber threats, which are constantly changing and becoming more covert and sophisticated. Accordingly, the CTO needs to embed security in every technological aspect of their organization and collaborate with the CISO to ensure more robust security governance and efficient security operations (SecOps).

The role of the CTO in security can be described in six key areas, as follows:

1. Security Governance

Security governance requires strategizing and implementing the security defenses of an organization. This should be in the form of a 360-degree approach that closely evaluates and protects every asset of the organization, including the people and processes.

More notably, the organization must recognize that all of its data is not of equal value, and specific datasets need more protection than others. This tiered approach helps balance the risk of threats and helps allocate more resources to protect the most critical assets.

The CTO is well placed in the C-suite to have the authority and responsibility to engage senior management in understanding cybersecurity priorities and creating executive buy-in for cyber risk management programs. The CTO should help identify priority levels required for various datasets and invest the needed resources accordingly — budget, personnel and technology. This requires collaboration among senior management to determine the value of multiple data assets in an organization.

In engaging senior management, the responsibility lies with the CTO to help them comprehend how various security programs are effective and why cybersecurity should be considered a permanent capital expenditure, rather than allocating budgets reactively with respect to any recent security incidents.

2. Close Collaboration With The CISO

In almost all industries, growth and business sustainability are increasingly relying on existing and new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT). While this is good for staying competitive and uncovering revenue growth, it also presents more cyber risk and complicates the process of defending against threats.

The CISO’s responsibility is to secure digital fronts and assets and fortify cyber defenses. However, the CTO should closely collaborate with the CISO to mitigate the risks associated with new technologies while helping their organization tap into opportunities and benefits derived from new technologies. This approach requires emphasizing security as a fundamental aspect throughout the decision-making process. Consequently, preparing the cybersecurity unit to foresee risks and mitigate goes hand in hand with the new technology rollout and upgrades.

3. Deploying Security-First Technologies

Organizations are increasingly connecting their data and business systems to the internet to deliver value and grow revenue. This inherently exposes an organization to a multitude of threats and massive points of entry to defend.

Additionally, organizations need to combat insider threats from employees, partners and suppliers. The CTO can help prepare and enforce a governance framework that thoroughly validates technologies used in an organization and ensure that they take a security-first approach, where technologies and processes considered inherently less secure become obsolete within the organization.

For example, the CTO can start disallowing employees to use insecure email clients or protocols that don’t use multifactor authentication — or start requiring partners to meet a set of security standards to be qualified for business engagement.

4. Continually Evaluating The Organizational Technology Landscape

No matter how thoroughly an organization’s cyber defenses are fortified, weak links in the form of improperly maintained systems or irregular approaches to patching security fixes can pose the risk of undetected vulnerabilities and exploitation. The CTO should help continually identify tools and platforms used throughout the organization and evaluate whether the underlying maintenance and patching processes are relevant and robust against today’s cyber threats.

5. Embedding Security Into Processes And Operations

The CTO should help create a culture that prioritizes security as the responsibility of the whole organization instead of considering it a function of the IT department alone. This requires analyzing security risks at many different levels and engaging everyone in the organization about the necessity for following organizational security practices.

While the CISO holds an operational role in ensuring security for processes and operations, the CTO needs to help their CISO with executive approval and engagement programs that involve department managers from the beginning. This ensures that the respective leaders and senior managers understand the security imperative and offer cooperative support.

6. Vendor Management With Security As A Key Aspect

An organization today works with various vendors for its needs across business units and functions. The CTO is responsible for setting security standards that dictate how the organization chooses to work with or acquire tools from vendors. It’s imperative to restrict business units from collaborating with vendors that don’t meet the security and compliance requirements, such as their testing policy, bug bounty programs, responsible vulnerability disclosure policy, and the prioritization of security patches.

It’s also not uncommon to rely on open-source software or tools available for free, requiring a support contract for on-time response and prioritizing fixing issues that impact the organization. It’s necessary to explicitly review open-source usage in the organization and set up support contracts with open-source vendors or project maintainers to ensure that the organization is not exposed to external vulnerabilities.

The CTO’s Changing Role

Today, security has become an organization-wide imperative, not just the responsibility of the IT department. Accordingly, the CTO — as a technology leader of the organization — is tasked with the overall security governance while closely collaborating with the CISO and senior security professionals. And the CTO’s primary responsibility is to persuade the senior management to prioritize security as an organizational responsibility in making everybody observe security practices and processes as fundamental to the business and its cyber risk management.

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5 data privacy imperatives for enterprise leaders

Enterprise leaders have been under constant pressure to sustain business and explore new opportunities for growth due to the disruptive nature of digital natives that survived through the dot-com bubble and are thriving. And then, the digital landscape snowballed, followed by a pandemic that disrupted the way the world works. These events mostly favored the digital natives that thrive with technology to become dominant players in their segment.

While enterprise leaders worked through the pandemic, the ongoing geopolitical tensions in Eastern Europe have had surprising effects on the world economy, which seemed to be recovering well from the pandemic’s impact before the conflict.

In fact, enterprise leaders have to deal with such random events now and then. For example, McKinsey estimates that enterprises can expect supply chain disruptions lasting a month or more every 3.7 years. This is a lot more to deal with, so how can enterprise leaders be ready to respond to and remediate the effects of such events?

The answer lies with data-informed decision-making and strategic execution. Achieving this is easier said than done: It requires changing how enterprise leaders think about data and how it is managed.

Here are five data imperatives enterprise leaders should think about.

Too much data collection is expensive

The imperative is to understand which data points to collect and then how to process and store them. The old-style thinking that too much data can’t be bad for business is proving wrong: as data volumes grow exponentially, the cost of managing and securing the data effectively becomes time- and cost-intensive. Hence, it is essential to think through which data points to collect and how long they should be stored.

Centralize data systems

It implies having a single source of truth and avoiding redundancies that will not work in a synchronized manner. Centralizing data systems, along with methodically choosing which data points to collect, helps various departments have seamless access to the necessary data and operate optimally — for example, understanding customer journeys across products and services to serve highly-relevant content and experiences. Further, it simplifies serving data privacy requests and helps reduce compliance risk.

Manage data as a product

Different teams in an enterprise often build data pipelines and process data as per their individual needs. This makes it difficult for another team to leverage the processed data; instead, they would need to process the same raw data per their specific needs.

To gain more value from the data system and programs, enterprise leaders should strategize managing data as a product as the next step to centralizing data systems. This helps manage data in a way that serves multiple purposes and offers more value to the whole enterprise.

Leverage technology for compliance

Enterprises already deal with a range of regulatory requirements. Additionally, the regulatory landscape around data management has been rapidly evolving. Imagine the regulations around storing and processing health data, payments data, or children’s data, among others. And then, there are regulations specifically designed to protect consumer data privacy, such as GDPR.

Positively, while the regulatory landscape has been growing, so has regtech, which helps enterprises manage compliance. Enterprise leaders should actively explore regtech platforms that align well with compliance requirements and business priorities. For example, at LoginRadius, we balance the business need for identity management with compliance requirements.

Data privacy as a competitive advantage

Today, being proactive about data privacy is a competitive advantage. It is evident in the rise of privacy-focused alternatives to popular services like Google Search, Microsoft Outlook, and Dropbox, among others.

Privacy-focused doesn’t always require a radical reshifting of how business is carried out. It can begin with a friendly privacy policy that specifies what data is collected and how it helps deliver value to consumers, followed by clearly laying out how consumers can raise data privacy-related requests and what the enterprise does to safeguard the data.

Conclusion

As enterprise leaders become well-equipped to address the current data management and privacy needs, they should explore how they can ensure their data programs across the enterprise are future-ready. It is essential because the future of business will become more and more about combining industry-specific expertise and technical know-how with data management capabilities.

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Originally published at VentureBeat

5 data privacy imperatives for enterprise leaders

For data-informed decision-making and strategic execution, enterprise leaders need to change how they think about data and how it is managed.

VentureBeatDeepak Gupta

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Authentication Identity Verification and Identification: What's the Difference

People usually consider authentication, id verification, and identification the same thing, but they are entirely different when we see stuff through the lens of information security experts. Learn the fundamental differences between the three and the importance of each from an information security perspective.

Introduction

In a technologically-driven modern world, we have to prove our identities by authenticating ourselves several times a day to get secure access to devices, networks, and platforms.

However, when we talk about authentication, id verification, and identification, things seem to revolve around just verifying a profile/person, but it’s not the case.

People usually consider all three the same thing, but things are entirely different when we see stuff through the lens of information security experts.

Let’s uncover the fundamental differences between the three terms and understand the importance of each term.

What is Authentication?

Authentication can be defined as proving the identity of a user accessing a computer system or a network.

Authentication helps verify the identity of a person they claim to be. Once the identity is confirmed, access to a particular account, resource, or computer system is granted.

In a nutshell, authentication uniquely identifies an individual via a set of credentials. In the digital world, authentication verifies a person's identity or an electronic device.

Authentication becomes necessary because it increases the security of consumers' data. No one can enter the website and access your data without verifying or authenticating oneself.

The most famous example of authentication is entering into a system using login credentials.

With the massive increase in digital platforms, the demand for various authentication processes has increased for both online and physical systems.

What is Identity Verification?

Identity verification can be defined as ensuring that users provide correct information associated with the identity of a natural person they claim to be.

Identity verification ensures that no unauthorized person is carrying out a process by using false identities or hijacking their identities on any other's behalf.

Verifying identities is a crucial security measure that mitigates the risks of fraud and identity thefts. It also helps carry out KYC (know your customers) processes for secure account management.

On the other hand, digital identity verification is the process of verifying the identity of an individual by using computer technology. Digital identity document verification can help businesses and governments verify users' identities online.

What is Identification?

Identification refers to identifying a person through identity proof to ensure no unauthorized person accesses sensitive information.

Businesses must ensure that they have robust mechanisms to identify their users and customers so that no fraudster could impersonate a user and access critical information.

Moreover, identity theft is swiftly becoming the new way of exploiting customer information, which can also cause financial losses to businesses.

Adding stringent security layers in the form of multi-factor authentication (MFA) and risk-based authentication (RBA) could significantly decrease the chances of identity theft.

What is the Purpose of Identity Security?

Identity security is a comprehensive way to secure digital identities within a network in the most basic sense.

Any identity- whether a team member, third-party vendor, consumer, or IT admin can be privileged in specific ways that can lead to a security breach causing losses worth millions of dollars for an organization.

Adding multiple layers of security through robust authentication and authorization can help mitigate identity theft risk.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19 encouraged remote working ecosystems that aren’t as secure as traditional working environments, there’s an immediate need for an identity security solution for businesses adopting these remote working scenarios.

Why Do You Need Identity Security?

In the past couple of years, businesses have been compromising consumer identities, leading to financial losses and tarnished reputations.

Even the most robust security system can’t ensure identity security without stringent authentication and authorization mechanisms.

Apart from this, the sudden paradigm shift towards online platforms has also increased the number of signups and registrations on diverse media leading to an increased risk of data breaches since most users aren’t aware of online security best practices.

Also, specific privacy and data security compliances like the GDPR and CCPA require organizations storing consumer information to adhere to their regulations to ensure maximum consumer safety. In contrast, their data is being collected, stored, and managed.

How LoginRadius Help with Authentication, Identity Verification, and Identification?

LoginRadius' modern CIAM solution is designed to be more flexible and intuitive. It addresses every subtle component that can improve consumers' experience while providing an unmatched safeguard for private data.

What puts LoginRadius ahead of the curve are the three most fundamental aspects:

• Frictionless security: Strengthened security doesn't have to come at the cost of convenience. LoginRadius' modern CIAM solution like MFA, passwordless login, phone login, social login, etc., ensures no friction while authenticating.
• Privacy management: Proficient privacy management is the key to winning consumers' trust. Our new-age CIAM solution considers every subtle privacy concern related to international regulations like the GDPR and the CCPA.
• Seamless integration: Another feature that sets LoginRadius' new-age CIAM apart from the rest is the seamless integration with the modern tools geared to offer smooth and secure access.
• MFA and RBA: LoginRadius offers stringent account security through multi-factor authentication that only authenticated users can access accounts or systems. Also, risk-based authentication ensures robust security in high-risk situations.

If you wish to experience the next level of account security and authentication, reach the LoginRadius team to schedule a personalized demo.

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Originally published at LoginRadius

Authentication, Identity Verification, and Identification | LoginRadius Blog

Authentication, identity verification, and identification are crucial aspects from an IT security perspective. Read on to know the difference between them.

loginradiusDeepak Gupta

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What is Out-of-Band Authentication?

Securing customer information is becoming more challenging, especially in a remote-first working environment with a poor line of defense. OOB authentication is used as a part of multi-factor authentication (MFA) or 2FA that verifies the identity of a user from two different communications channels, ensuring robust security.

Introduction

In a world where data breaches are becoming the new normal, businesses are exploring new ways to protect customer identities. At the same time, cybercriminals are finding new ways to sneak into a business network.

Although identity theft isn’t a new challenge that businesses face every day, the outburst of COVID-19 has increased the number of attacks that can’t be overlooked.

Hence, securing customer information is becoming more challenging, especially in a remote-first working environment with a poor line of defense.

However, multi-factor authentication (MFA) and two-factor authentication have been safeguarding customer identities and sensitive information for a long time. And now it’s time for businesses to think about out-of-band-authentication (OOBA) to reinforce security.

OOB authentication is used as a part of multi-factor authentication (MFA) or 2FA that verifies the identity of a user from two different communications channels, ensuring robust security.

Let’s look at some aspects of OOBA and why businesses should put their best foot forward in adopting a stringent identity security mechanism in 2022 and beyond.

What is Out-of-Band Authentication? Why is it's Becoming the Need of the Hour?

Out-of-band authentication refers to multi-factor authentication requiring a secondary verification mechanism through a different communication channel along with the conventional id and password.

Cybersecurity experts recommend OOB authentication for high-security requirements where enterprises can’t compromise on consumer identity security and account takeover risks.

Generally, OOB authentication is a part of MFA, requiring users to verify their identity through two communication channels. The goal is to offer maximum security for customers and businesses in high-risk scenarios.

Now let’s understand why OOB authentication is swiftly becoming the need for enterprises.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic has changed how organizations operate and offer access to their critical resources, cyber threats have substantially increased.

Whether we talk about loopholes in access management or frail lines of defense, businesses have faced losses worth millions in the past couple of years.

Hence, a robust authentication mechanism is what every business organization needs. And OOB authentication fulfills their security requirements since it works on a dual means of verifying identity through different communication mechanisms.

How Does OOB Authentication Work?

OOB authentication works on the principle of multi-factor authentication and ensures that business data and user information remains secure even if one line of defense is compromised.

Let’s learn this through a real-life example. Suppose you’re about to purchase your favorite stuff online and need to pay through internet banking.

You’ve entered your user id and password for completing the transaction, and now the bank sends a one-time password (OTP) to your phone to complete the transaction. Once you provide the right combination of user id, password, and OTP, your order gets completed.

However, the essential thing you need to understand is that even if a cybercriminal has access to your user id or password, it cannot complete the transaction without the OTP, which is either sent to your smartphone or through email.

Hence, the risks for account takeover and fraud are minimized up to a great extent with OOB as attackers couldn’t bypass multiple layers of authentication.

Some great examples of out-of-band (OOB) authentication include:

• QR codes with encrypted data
• Phone calls for voice authentication
• One-time passwords
• Biometrics, including Face ID and Touch ID

In Conclusion

Adding multiple authentication layers is now becoming the need of the hour, especially in the most unpredictable times when hackers find new ways to sneak into a business network.

With out-of-band authentication, businesses can ensure robust security for their customers and their sensitive information, which is always at risk if multiple authentication factors aren’t incorporated.

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Originally published at LoginRadius

What is Out-of-Band Authentication? I LoginRadius | LoginRadius Blog

With increasing cybersecurity risks, businesses shouldn’t ignore the importance of out-of-band authentication. Read more.

loginradiusDeepak Gupta

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5 Signs Your Traditional IAM System Needs a CIAM Makeover

Introduction

If you're serving your clients online, you must be aware that almost 80% of online shopping orders were abandoned, i.e., not converted as per stats of March 2021. And this pattern isn’t new; it’s the new normal.

Your customers are already interacting with brands like Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google. They know what a great personalized user experience is. And if you’re not offering the same level of user experience on your online platform, you won’t be able to match their expectations!

Users will land on your website/app, browse a little, find what they’re looking for, and then a single lousy experience will force them to switch—resulting in cart abandonment.

But why do businesses face such issues? Are there any issues that are causing users to switch?

Undoubtedly, yes! Poor login and authentication with or without traditional IAM (identity and access management) are the most common issues that force users to switch.

Businesses are still relying on old-school login and authentication mechanisms, including organization-level IAM, which is why their business lags behind their competitors.

And the catch is that they aren’t aware of consumer identity and access management (CIAM) platforms that can help them overcome the challenges of low conversions and lead generation.

Let’s quickly understand the aspects of traditional IAM and why businesses need the true potential of CIAM.

Traditional IAM vs. CIAM- What’s the Difference?

Traditional identity and access management (IAM) solutions are traditionally used to streamline employee provisioning, manage access rights, assist in compliance reporting, automate approval workflows, fuel authentication, authorization, and numerous other security-relevant functions.

But out of convenience, businesses try to adopt this technology to manage customer identities as well. Unfortunately, internal identity management systems don’t have the right capabilities to manage and secure the hundreds of millions of users on consumer-facing platforms.

This is where customer IAM (CIAM) solutions come in. These solutions have been built to specifically handle the requirements for customer authentication, scalability, privacy and data regulations, user experience, and integration.

In comparison to internal management, a customer identity and access management (CIAM) solution improves the customer experience, reduces security risks, shrinks costs, and increases the availability of applications.

Since we’ve learned about the significant differences between a CIAM and conventional IAM, let’s closely look at some signs that depict that your business now needs a CIAM makeover.

Why Should You Make the Switch to a CIAM Solution?

#1. You have good traffic but no leads or conversions.

One of the most significant indicators of bad authentication and user management is that your website or mobile application has good traffic but isn’t converting.

Most of the time, users face friction in authentication, remembering passwords, or going through multiple registration stages. This annoying experience forces them to switch to your competitors, offering seamless authentication, registration, and login experience.

So, what’s the ideal solution for this dilemma?

Well, a cutting-edge cloud-based CIAM solution like LoginRadius can help you increase your conversions and generate more leads.

With features like Social Login, Single Sign-On (SSO), and Progressive Profiling, you can stay assured your users aren’t facing any hurdles from the moment they interact with your brand.

#2. You need more user data for improving sales & marketing strategy, but you’re clueless about where to get it.

Businesses collect consumer data, but it is often segregated among repositories and departments. The CIAM platform provides you with a wealth of information on your consumers’ identities and habits.

Unlike traditional IAM, CIAM allows building a detailed profile of each consumer, including personal information, purchase histories, and usage and purchasing patterns.

This data may be combined into a single consumer view, which may be pushed into other enterprise programs to improve sales forecasting, tailored marketing, and new product development.

APIs are widely used in the latest generation of CIAM platforms to link identity data and analytics into complementary systems like content management, ERP, and consumer experience management.

#3. You’re worried about sensitive consumer and business data.

Concerning the traditional IAM, authentication has been a simple decision based on the credentials supplied up until now. This was accomplished by using a username and password that were both relatively weak.

Though the invention of two-factor authentication (2FA) employing a second step such as an SMS message has helped, it is still vulnerable to hacking.

The CIAM, on the other hand, offers multi-factor authentication (MFA), which can include biometrics, geolocation, and user behavior, providing increased security. These features also enable the use of analytics to give additional capabilities like anomaly detection, which may be used to identify and address unexpected behavior swiftly.

The LoginRadius CIAM platform provides security beyond the client, including employees, partners, applications, and interconnected devices, to develop a comprehensive end-to-end solution.

#4. You don’t know how to meet global data regulatory and privacy compliances.

Data privacy is a critical component of any CIAM solution, especially when consumers are responsible for their data and profile management.

Unlike the traditional IAM, the CIAM platform offers your consumers visibility and control over how and where their data is shared. So it includes both consent and preference management, which allows your consumers to choose how their data is collected and used.

Consent management, for example, must allow your client to establish multi-level consent – where data can be used for one reason but not for another – that can be turned on and off at any moment, according to EU’s GDPR requirements.

The CIAM platform necessitates significant self-service features so that your consumers may manage their consents and preferences through their profile, as well as robust tracking and auditing so that you can meet other global compliances, including California's CCPA.

#5. You’re not making new customers.

You can’t ignore the fact that new customer acquisition is as essential as retaining current customers. If you’re not making new customers, it’s high time you must incorporate a CIAM solution instead of the traditional IAM.

Endless reasons, including a lengthy registration process, could lead to situations where you cannot convert new users and drop the overall growth rates.

By incorporating a CIAM solution like LoginRadius, you can leverage the true potential of progressive profiling that enables your customers to share their details gradually and not immediately when they interact for the first time with your platform.

Apart from this, creating personalized customer journeys by leveraging social media data and consumer behavior can also help increase engagement with your brand leading to more new conversions.

Looking Forward

Modern customers know exactly what they want, and to ensure they don’t switch, organizations have to stay ahead of the competition by pleasing their users right from the beginning they interact with their brand.

Also, the traditional IAM cannot meet the surging demands of today’s customers. Hence, it’s crucial to incorporate a reliable CIAM solution like LoginRadius that helps deliver a rich consumer experience and robust security and helps meet global compliance requirements.

If you’re facing any of the challenges mentioned above, it’s high time to switch to a reliable CIAM solution.

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Originally published at LoginRadius.com

5 Signs Your Business Needs CIAM Over Traditional IAM | LoginRadius Blog

The traditional IAM will not work for the new-age customers. Read this insightful post to understand the importance of a reliable CIAM for business growth.

loginradiusDeepak Gupta

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