Insider risk: Why you should keep an open eye and closed door

Here’s a riddle: It knows your business inside and out, you won’t have to look very far to find it…and it may be your biggest security gap of all.

Spoiler: It’s insider risk.

At the most basic level, insider risk is anyone with access to your data. This includes your board and C-level executives, all the way down to your newest and most junior employees. It also includes your partners, attorneys and third-party vendors.

Now, it’s not that all these people intend to do harm. They’re humans, and humans make mistakes. But in today’s world, they’re mistakes your business can’t afford to make. But while insider risk can be unintentional, insider threats are driven by ulterior motives to steal your data or sabotage your entire corporate system.

Here’s the catch: You may think you already have the infrastructure in place to safeguard your company—but protecting ourselves from insider risk and insider threats isn’t what it used to be. Today, you have employees assigned to home offices or other remote locations, ripe for both malicious insiders and well-intentioned employees who make costly mistakes. In fact, recent data shows that a staggering 43% of companies confirmed insider attacks against their organizations, within the last year alone. And when we consider our new hybrid way of working, this wave of insider risk is only getting bigger.

So how do you mitigate new insider risk?

As the threat landscape continues to evolve, companies need to evolve as well. Converged cyber-physical security controls need to be implemented to protect a company’s people, physical assets, data, intellectual property and reputation. And they need to do it while simultaneously satisfying industry compliance requirements.

Here’s how:

Boost the data you have for better insights: Tackle insider risk and threats with AI-powered anomaly detection, risk scores for identities and robust dashboards for high-risk identities. Our intelligence platform positions your existing data to deliver risk visibility and insights across IT, OT, HR and physical security so you can act on potential threats, track utilization, occupancy and capacity, and optimize your workspaces.

Zero-trust physical access: As the reality of hybrid work models takes shape, it’s a good time to explore a zero-trust approach to your physical access control system. A best practice in cybersecurity (trust no one, validate everyone), our policy-based access control (PBAC) cloud service reinvents your existing PACS to dynamically authorize secure physical access—only when people need it. Whether you use a standard card reader, biometrics or mobile credentials, you can authorize or restrict access in real-time at the door according to company needs and policies.

Make room for access governance: According to Gartner, 75% of organizations will restructure risk and security governance by 2023 to address new cyber-physical systems and converged IT, OT and physical security needs, an increase from fewer than 15% today.

Lead the way by managing identity, access and security through a converged cyber-physical approach to gain a holistic view of your enterprise-wide security landscape—protecting your business from risk, both inside and out.