Insider Risk Management: Security Starts Within

In a recent blog we highlighted the mandatory capabilities for enterprise IRM platforms referenced in the 2022 Gartner® Market Guide for Insider Risk Management Solutions, and how DoControl addresses each of them with our no-code SaaS security platform. It goes without saying that technology is the main tenant to any security program that aims to take on a variety of critical use cases and mitigate the risk of a data breach or exfiltration. 

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When it comes to addressing insider risk, security starts within. Protecting sensitive company data from exfiltration and misuse requires a combination of the right people, process, and technology. 

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• People: Human error will always be a factor, but it’s critical to proactively train your employees and foster a security-minded culture within your organization. Educating your people is key to protecting your business against insider-led attacks. 
• Process: Establish security policies that proactively mitigate access issues to prevent insider risks from becoming material threats to the business. This is especially important for data stored within SaaS applications, which is complex to monitor and control.
• Technology: Organizations can protect themselves using an arsenal of tools that empowers the security team to remediate insider threats quickly using intelligent technology and automation.

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Managing insider risk and preventing threats to the business is not achieved with any of these pillars individually. Modern businesses require technology that prevents and detects unauthorized access to critical assets; processes to support automated data access remediation; and people that are educated about – and watchful of – potentially risky activity who can course-correct during potentially risky activity. Modern organizations need all three pillars interconnected in order to protect their most critical assets.

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Insider Risk Mitigation

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1. Enforce least privilege. Systematically enforcing least privilege across your organization secures the business against negligent and compromised insiders. Tools that minimize end-user access based on necessity and automatically prevents or notifies security teams about high-risk activity provides an extra layer of protection against exfiltration.
2. Prevent external sharing to private email accounts. If business users are free to share sensitive information to external users unauthorized and unmonitored, it’s incredibly difficult to prevent malicious insiders from exfiltrating data. This goes double for data stored outside the organizational perimeter, i.e., within SaaS apps.
3. Automate data access controls. Security teams require tools that enable them to act quickly to remediate data access issues and prevent overexposure to protect the business – ideally, tools that automatically send alerts for risky activity and allow for the creation of data access policies that help prevent insider risks from becoming threats.

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Move Security Closer to What Drives Your Business

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DoControl provides foundational data access controls that help proactively secure modern businesses against insider risk with insider threat solutions. The platform acts as the connective tissue between business users and security teams (e.g. people, process, technology!), enabling the business to be moved forward in a secure way. Our solution provides asset management for full visibility into all SaaS users and events, continuous monitoring to identify and alert on potential threats, and automated orchestration via initiation of secure workflows to prevent sensitive data from becoming overexposed or exfiltrated. Learn more by registering for our upcoming webinar where we will dive into the insider risk management use case. 

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