Every industry, organization, and business is starting to embrace the digital world if they haven’t already. As the world transitions faster and faster to a digital world in the 21st century, organizations use more online resources, automated systems, analytics and algorithms, and many other technology-driven, digital assets. Commerce, business, and communication are not at all how they used to be, and because of that, there needs to be just as much digital protection as physical security. More and more, digital security is even more prioritized than physical resources.
When it comes to digital security, prevention is often more important than fixing breaches or threats after the fact because once you have the issue at hand, it becomes more difficult to manage. This is why digital risk protection exists and why companies everywhere are investing in this kind of security.
What is Digital Risk Protection?
Digital Risk Protection (DRP) is the tools and resources used to protect the digital assets of a company or organization, specifically during digital transformation. There are dozens of external threats that target digital assets like social media channels, IoT devices, cloud systems, accounts, and any other sources that offer access to data, brand platforms, etc.
DRP is largely focused on prevention and uses advanced algorithms and programs to identify, track, and troubleshoot threats in real time. Filtering this constant stream of data and putting it through the proper analysis process is a key component of security teams, ensuring that the biggest risks and threats are prioritized so that there aren’t intelligence data overloads that are impossible to manage. The more relevant the threat, the easier it is to make decisions about risk mitigation and response.
What is a Digital Risk Protection Service?
A Digital Risk Protection Service is a managed, holistic service that typically offers a platform, system, or other technology to spearhead cybersecurity threat prevention. As companies move to digital processes and data management, it’s becoming standard practice to use a DRP service to fully safeguard digital assets at scale, which is much harder to do without advanced and comprehensive services.
The primary functions of a Digital Risk Protection Service are to:
- Monitor and protect all digital external endpoints that give cybercriminals access to digital assets or an organization’s private information.
- Cater to the specific needs of a company and its business goals, aligning data protection strategies with business objectives.
- Facilitate unmitigated access to a business’s technology and devices.
- Ultimately prevent an organization’s digital tools and information from being hacked or threatened while being implemented.
Why is Digital Risk Protection Important?
Having a security system in place for your business is always recommended, but investing specifically in a DRP is essential as you move to a digital system or begin using digital resources. Not only does DRP protect companies from cyber threats or expensive fines, but it also helps with continuity and functionality by ensuring all of your new systems and technology are running smoothly.
Digital threats vary in type, severity, and cost risk, which can all impact a business in different ways. Some of the digital risks that DRPs are protecting businesses from are:
- Operational. If a criminal can access a digital tool, device, or technology with malware or other means, it’s easily possible to lose certain functions in a business. Even if there isn’t a hacker behind the issue, a poorly executed digital transformation could affect your productivity as a company. When an automated process is disrupted, for example, you lose time, money, and potential clients.
- Reputational. Especially with online or social media accounts, hackers can misrepresent a company or brand with false information or viruses, which makes that company less trustworthy. This could be the result of a data leak or even criminals who reach clients, customers, or employees using phishing scams, impersonations, website spoofing, or other channels of communication.
- Compliance. Digital transformation is convenient, but there are new compliance risks when it comes to correctly implementing new technologies so that all procedures, devices, and security setups meet industry standards. DRP is key to avoid hefty non-compliance fines, particularly when client information is involved.
- Financial. This is of course the biggest impact companies look at when dealing with digital threats—what is the financial risk associated with digitizing your operations? If you can’t produce or function correctly, if you lose customers due to a lack of credibility, or if hackers gain access to a digital system that processes financial data, you can lose a great deal of money.
What Are the Functions of Digital Risk Protection?
DRPs can have a wide range of responsibilities to ensure that a company’s systems, processes, data, and customer information are secure. Some of the most common and important roles of a DRP include the following topics.
Digital footprint mapping
To protect an entire business ecosystem, it’s essential to have a clear and detailed view of all digital assets. This is what DRP calls digital footprint mapping, where you can discover and map all of your digital assets to understand potential threats and accurately monitor those assets.
Exposed assets may look like open ports, cloud storage systems that have been misconfigured, or unpatched vulnerabilities in your software, which is sometimes referred to as the attack surface. Having reliable visibility of resources and assets is critical to effectively expose threats a business may face.
Threat monitoring
Protecting assets means both reinforcing asset safeguards and having systems in place that monitor and flag potential external threats. Vulnerability prioritization is a big part of a monitoring strategy because if there are too many notifications or flags that all take priority, it becomes dangerously difficult to weed out the low-risk scenarios from high-level concerns.
Threats can come from all kinds of sources that go after a range of business models, such as targeting the brand with cybersquatting, stealing credentials to defame an account, extorting businesses using phishing scams or accessing a credit card, or any other form of theft or data exploitation.
A DRP should be able to scan the online world with significant depth, like monitoring threats that come from the surface web, deep web, and dark web. Other platforms that cyber criminals target that are often under-prioritized include cloud solutions, IoT devices, and social media channels.
Risk mitigation
Once you have systems in place that identify and monitor threats, there also needs to be some form of digital risk mitigation that helps with response and mitigation. This is often accomplished using automated technology that informs security analysts quickly, as well as other tools like browser-blocking, takedown APIs, killswitches, etc.
Maintaining protection
Even an established system needs to be regularly analyzed and reported on, which helps security teams and business leaders discover ways to improve procedures and workflows that more efficiently defend against threats. This is a fairly standard function of most DRP services and platforms.
Digital Risk Protection with Ontinue
As your business grows and becomes more competitive by digitizing your procedures and services, you will also have a greater attack surface that cyber threats will go after. To protect your business, clients, customers, and employees, you need a reliable digital risk protection service to ensure your workflows and systems are safely functioning and smoothly transitioning to a digital ecosystem.
Ontinue offers DRP services that shield your organization from risks and threats that come with the digital territory, including engineers who monitor and assess cyber risk data, real-time cyber risk mitigation, and much more. With advanced programs that automate security processes, we cut through the noise so that you can focus on your business. See what digital risk protection can do for your organization and contact Ontinue today.