Frost & Sullivan Finds Rising Insider Threat Incidents Forcing Enterprises to Adopt a Proactive Security Approach

Given the exponential volumes of data leaving the traditional network perimeter every day by volition of an enterprise’s own users, the growing risk of data theft is harder to anticipate than ever before.
One of the most challenging obstacles to insider threat prevention has been that most enterprises ignore their users within their risk assessments.
When executives and employees are treated like partners and are encouraged to help mitigate potential risks, security teams will be able to lead a more successful insider threat prevention effort

With increased digitalization and enterprise infrastructures scaling rapidly, core users have access to systems and networks that host millions of records and critical business assets. This, combined with the immediate pivot to virtual work in 2020, meant security leaders were racing to protect their business and manage a remote workforce. Given the exponential volumes of data leaving the traditional network perimeter every day by volition of an enterprise’s own users, the growing risk of data theft is harder to anticipate than ever before. One of the most challenging obstacles to insider threat prevention has been that most enterprises ignore their users within their risk assessments.

“A major catalyst for an effective insider threat program is a transparent partnership between IT teams and executive decision-makers to fuel two primary objectives: getting management buy-in for approvals on expenditure and interest in participation and curating a leadership-driven culture that facilitates effective collaboration with employees,” observed Kenny Yeo, Associate Director, Security Practice, Frost & Sullivan. “When executives and employees are treated like partners and are encouraged to help mitigate potential risks, instead of being viewed as uninvolved outsiders, security teams will be able to lead a more successful insider threat prevention effort.”

“Proofpoint Insider Threat Management (ITM) uses a people-centric approach to user risk analysis, aggregating and organizing contextual threat data for each event to increase the efficiency and fidelity of threat triage and analysis,” noted Andy Rose, Resident CISO at Proofpoint. “Armed with a proactive platform approach, enterprises can accelerate incident response and remediation, maintain privacy throughout the early investigation phase, gain substantial cost/resource savings, and reduce organizational risk.”

By encompassing the full range of security scenarios, Proofpoint’s platform addresses four key tenets:

People-centric visibility into every user action involving sensitive content, applications, endpoints, and servers for high-risk users. This approach can be easily integrated into existing threat intelligence efforts.
Insider threat detection and data loss prevention to stop data exfiltration, privilege abuse, application misuse, unauthorized access, accidental activity, and other anomalous activity.
Incident response and investigation accelerated by using timeline workflows and evidence presented in easy-to-understand visualizations of user-driven events, fostering collaboration between security, IT, HR, legal, regulatory, and other teams.
Modern architecture with application programming interfaces that enhance scalability, security, and privacy and provide flexible software-as-a-service or on-premises deployment.

To read more, please visit https://www.frost.com