Digital Infrastructure Protection for Business Growth

Digital Infrastructure Protection for Business Growth

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For mid-sized organizations, the internet is the great equalizer that can rapidly scale a small startup into a global company. While accelerated growth enables stronger-than-expected revenue outcomes, it comes with equally accelerated online risk. Depending on your business model, your product or services may rely heavily on the underlying digital infrastructure. As your business grows, the current technologies may no longer adequately protect your operations and security.  

As your company scales, you should consider whether you need to mature your digital infrastructure and its security.  

What is digital infrastructure? 

The digital infrastructure consists of hardware, software, and communication technologies that support business operations. Some examples of the technologies in the digital infrastructure include: 

  • Datacenters 
  • Networks 
  • Servers, like DNS servers and web servers 
  • Applications, like email and corporate website 
  • Storage equipment 

The digital infrastructure sector typically includes: 

  • Telecommunications companies 
  • Domain Name System (DNS) providers 
  • Top Level Domain (TLD) providers 
  • Data centers 
  • Trust services  
  • Cloud services

Depending on an organization’s business model, it may rely more heavily on its digital infrastructure. While all modern companies rely on digital communications, some base their entire product or service offering around them.   

Consider the differences between these two companies and their technology needs: 

  • Plumber: website, email, voice-over-internet protocol (VOIP), and business applications for daily activities like scheduling, accounts receivable, accounts payable, customer relationship management 
  • Web application startup: website, email, VOIP, business applications, development environment, production environment with web application domain, secure coding tools

For the web application startup, a domain outage disrupts communications and the core product. Customers are unable to access the service, and the business disruption impacts overall revenue.   

Meanwhile, if the plumbing company experiences a domain outage, its website might be unavailable, and employees might not be able to get new customer emails. However, the core business operations of repairing pipes remain intact.  

When should a company invest in digital infrastructure protection? 

Business growth pain mimics those undefinable aches that come from a teenage growth spurt. You know something doesn’t quite feel right, but you can’t identify the pain’s root cause. If your organization relies heavily on the digital infrastructure’s reliability and security, you may be wondering how to know when it’s time to invest in additional protections.  

Need for specialists. 

While your company relies on your digital infrastructure, your IT and security teams might be wearing too many hats. Rather than focusing on big picture strategic initiatives, the team is caught responding to basic IT help desk calls and implementing basic cyber hygiene on the fly. While your organization needs specialized skills, you might be lacking the time and budget to have the right people in the right place.  

Difficulty identifying technology needs. 

You have the fundamental technologies in place, like an endpoint detection and response (EDR) tool and an IT service management (ITSM) platform. However, securing the digital infrastructure becomes more complicated as your business scales.  

For example, if you’re working with a cloud services provider, like AWS or Azure, they manage the security of their cloud infrastructure, like data centers, but you still need to manage the security related to your web resources, which can include monitoring: 

  • Identity and Access Management (IAM): Who accesses resources and whether they should 
  • Application Programming Interfaces (APIs): sensitive data transferred between applications, including user credentials 
  • Web-based Attacks: malicious actors engaging in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), ransomware, and phishing attacks 
  • Configurations: hardening devices and software by disabling unnecessary services and functions 

New compliance requirements. 

Business growth often brings with it compliance pains. Whether customers need assurance over your security or you move into a regulated industry vertical, you likely need to start your information security compliance journey.  

For example, consider the following data protection laws, regulations, mandates, and frameworks your customers may ask about: 

  • General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): consumer privacy requirement for the European Union 
  • Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS): compliance mandate for any organization that processes payment card and account data 
  • System and Organization Controls (SOC) Report: independent third-party audit often used to respond to customer requests for security questionnaires 
  • National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework (CSF): risk-based requirements for addressing cybersecurity threats and risks  
  • Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA): security and privacy requirements for any organizations that qualify as “business associates”

At a minimum, your compliance program requires: 

  • Policies and procedures: written documentation that outlines the controls you plan to implement and the people responsible for managing them 
  • Technologies: tools for monitoring the environment and digital infrastructure 
  • Documentation: settings and reports proving that controls work as intended

3 Best Practices for Scaling Digital Infrastructure Security 

Every successful business experiences growing pains, but you can minimize the stress they place on your company by planning around the following best practices.   

1. Identify critical needs. 

You know that your business needs to expand its security and compliance programs. However, identifying the “must haves” from the “nice to haves” can be challenging as you start to move along the growth needle.  

The fundamental security and privacy questions build on the CIA triad of: 

  • Confidentiality: How do I keep sensitive data from unauthorized access? 
  • Integrity: How do I ensure no one makes unauthorized modifications to data? 
  • Availability: How do I keep my services online and prevent disruptions?

Often, organizations focus on confidentiality and integrity without considering the availability aspect. If you offer a product or service that relies on your digital infrastructure, you should consider the following critical needs: 

  • How will I manage growing traffic and spikes in traffic? 
  • How do I optimize performance for customers? 
  • How do I configure my digital infrastructure to ensure resiliency?

For example, if your product or services rely on your domain, you need: 

  • Reliable connections with DNS service redundancy to reduce service outage risk 
  • Cyber threat detection and response for proactive protection against phishing, malware, and ransomware that can take your services offline 
  • Automatic failover to mitigate risks arising from disruption to DNS servers, like DDoS attacks 

2. Find technology partners. 

As the business scales, you should look for technology partners that work with you. Purchasing technologies to help manage security and compliance only work when you have the right people using and managing them. If your organization is facing the growth stage challenges of hiring people with the IT and security skills necessary to manage a rapidly expanding IT environment, then you might want to consider asking yourself the following questions: 

  • What is my security technology stack missing? 
  • What people do I need on staff to manage my security monitoring? 
  • What work can I outsource to ensure I focus my financial and staffing resources where I need them most?

For example, as you scale your web-based business operations, service availability is critical to your reputation and customer satisfaction. However, many organizations find that technical security risk management becomes a challenge, especially when the organization needs to mitigate DoS/DDoS threats by: 

  • Configuring monitoring tools to redirect traffic  
  • Defining mitigation triggers based on bits/second or packets/second to automatically initiate a response 
  • Monitoring and analyzing traffic to identify an attack and trigger additional mitigations

3. Bundle related technologies. 

Security challenges don’t exist in a vacuum. Your interconnected environment comes with a series of interconnected security risks that require multiple layers of defense. For example, securing the digital infrastructure might require protections at: 

  • Application layer: mitigating risks arising from how applications access services 
  • Transport layer: ensuring that data transmissions use secure protocols 
  • Network layer: managing data paths to maintain service performance

From a digital infrastructure perspective, creating a defense-in-depth approach to security might include: 

  • Protective DNS: detecting, blocking, and intercepting risky traffic, including users attempting to access links in phishing emails or connections with attacker-controlled servers 
  • Web Application Firewall (WAF): filtering and monitoring HTTP traffic between applications and the public internet to block common attack patterns, like SQL injections and cross-site scripting (XSS) 
  • DDoS Protection: automating detection and mitigation activities, like traffic redirection 

By bundling associated technologies, you can reduce overall costs while improving security, especially when managing highly technical risk mitigations.   

Vercara UltraSecure: digital infrastructure protection that grows with your business. 

Vercara’s UltraSecure offers cybersecurity scalability plans to protect your growing business’s digital infrastructure.   

Our authoritative and protective DNS offerings enable accurate, safe, reliable connections and counterattacks of various sizes, lengths, and complexity. Our protective DNS also helps you implement a critical layer of defense against phishing, malware, and ransomware risks by allowing you to block malicious connections. Even if someone makes a mistake, you have a control that mitigates risks. We support these protections with our WAF to mitigate API attack risks, a growing concern for organizations with interconnected environments. With our WAF, you can protect against the OWASP Top 10 API Security Risks  

For companies that need to augment their internal resources, our professional services offerings enable you to work with experts who understand DNS traffic management and security. Our quick-start packages, including routine support services, enable you to rapidly implement and streamline the management of your digital infrastructure security.  

To see how Vercara’s UltraSecure can help you scale your business, security, and compliance – contact us today. 

Published On: October 3, 2024
Last Updated: October 2, 2024
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