To deliver work quickly, employees often look for ways to cut corners. It’s not malicious. It’s meant in the spirit of gaining faster time-to-market, increasing brand awareness, meeting end-of-quarter goals, and delivering rapidly in a warp-speed world. We’ve all seen it time and again.
What many employees don’t realize is that all those little indiscretions ultimately create a huge domino effect. (Listen closely. Do you hear the gentle tapping of dominoes falling in slow motion? Soon they’ll be falling faster and faster. Tapping will turn to pounding. In time, the impact will be deafening.)
As IT leaders, we’ve seen firsthand just how much rounding off corners can seriously impact security. We’ve discovered and mitigated instances of shadow IT, seen files copied to USB sticks, revealed personal email used when it shouldn’t be, and applied fixes to a host of other common behaviors that make us cringe. Taken collectively, little security workarounds put important things at risk — from confidential information to intellectual property to the health of applications and the sanctity of third-party information. And over time, the damage makes any corporation’s security perimeter look like Swiss cheese — full of holes.
Changing the Game
The good news is that these little indiscretions have forced us to get smarter about security. Many organizations now are changing the game by designing security around people. Citrix security expert Florin Lazurca sums it up beautifully. As he wrote in a recent blog, “Clearly, the perimeter must evolve to be people-centric, as threat-centric, network-centric, and app-centric designs alone do not suffice. Given the number of credential-based attacks, we must look past the security provided by a series of gates and locks and look deeper at user behavior — a series of detectors.”
Security that is designed around user behavior can help you protect your IT environment to a much greater degree than ever before by enabling:
- IT to promote user satisfaction, offering a single common interface on any device
- Users to securely access apps and data stored in multiple storage zones
- IT to offer access to apps and information based on context: the user’s role and his “need to know”
- Users to concentrate on their work without experiencing security roadblocks
- Employees to seamlessly and securely share information as they collaborate with coworkers and third parties outside the company
- IT to employ security analytics to detect anomalies in user behavior that might signal malicious intent
- Users to have easier access to the information needed to maintain compliance with government regulations: HIPAA, GDPR, PCI-DSS, GLBA, SOX, and many more.
WIth a solid strategy and the right technology partner, you can put a human face on security. And rather than locking people down, you can enable them to work when, where, and how they want. You can protect the integrity of your systems and data.
So stack up your dominoes and stop holding your breath anticipating that they will fall. And be sure to join us on Wednesday, January 30, for “5 Reasons why a people-centric security strategy safeguards sensitive information and facilitates compliance,” an actionable webinar where you’ll learn how to execute people-centric security strategy best practices that will help you change the game.
Learn more about Citrix Workspace and Citrix security.
