Smart Security:

Gaining Peace of Mind and Enabling Transformation

Digital Transformation achieves agility by driving technology automation and machine intelligence deeper into the fabric of business operations. In the context of the Legal sector, such business operations include automatic document processing, machine-assisted research, case analytics and business optimisation.

As human intervention and control is relinquished with a greater reliance on digital solutions, it is to safeguard the integrity of and trust in the technology. To maintain this trust, business leaders must have access to the appropriate reports, with supporting data points, from which business risk and operational health can be assessed.

To maintain trust and control it is also vital to protect the business brand, IP and customer data. But as platforms transition to multi-cloud and Software as a Service (SaaS) models, and data is pushed towards the business edge, the conventional security models are being fundamentally challenged.

Historically, the common approach to security was risk-based, with IT and business functions assessing security against policies or regulatory requirements. In the first instance, user access was only possible from within the boundaries of an organisation’s private network, and firewalls maintained strict access policies and threat detection to stand guard at the front door and govern who was allowed in.

From an Information Security (IS) perspective, data was encrypted at rest, and folder and file access was governed by Directory Services and end-user devices to reduce the risk of accidental or malicious threats.

The result was a tactical, rather than strategic, approach to security, which was further restricted by the multiple siloes which appeared as traditional boundaries blurred as a result of the adoption of multi-cloud services.

Now, priorities have changed. Our Legal sector experience highlights that in the current environment Security Officers (SOs) predominant focus is on protecting client data in order to achieve close alignment to the GDPR, which governs the use and protection of PII.

Statistics released under the Freedom of Information Act for the Q2 period of 2018/19 – July – Sept 2018 reveal the sorts of threats SOs are dealing with³:

3. Freedom of Information statistics: July to September 2018 - https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/freedom-of-information-statistics-july-to-september-2018

We have spotted a significant trend in these stats relating to the size of organisations: the small-to-medium firms are more likely to experience a specific cyber security breach than the largest organisations. Analysing the information behind the stats reveals that smaller firms were more likely to have less advanced security technology and were running software and hardware without up-to-date patch revisions.

So how can firms (of any size) respond to these threats while embracing Digital Transformation? In our eyes, ‘Smarter Security’ means establishing a proactive and holistic strategy to security: protecting data while supporting innovation, rather than stifling it.

The comparison between a more traditional approach and ‘Smarter Security’ is outlined in the table on the following page.

Section Summary

Digital Transformation can increase security concerns, due to the multi-cloud approach and the blurring of organisational boundaries.
Smarter security is about proactive security and as much about mitigating user error as it is about warding off cyber-attacks.
Data Loss Prevention can protect personal data from leaving your organisation either accidentally or with intent.
Rather than acting as an inhibitor to innovation, agile security should increase the confidence of your organisation to innovate.