Secrets management protects sensitive and valuable information from external threats and employee misuse, misappropriation, and disclosure. Organizations must have a clear strategy to manage their sensitive data and keep it secure. With the digital world becoming more connected than ever, businesses must adopt strategies that will help them quickly respond to security breaches or sensitive leaks. The digital era has brought increased risks of data loss, theft, hacking, and other cyberattacks that can cause significant damage if not handled properly. It’s essential to understand the different security risks you might face to implement a comprehensive safeguards strategy accordingly.
What are the different types of security risks?
The modern world is both an opportunity for organizations and a threat to their security. Your organization could face many security risks, and understanding them can help you determine what to focus on in your security strategy.
Physical threats: This type of risk is posed by outside actors who try to get their hands on your data by physically accessing your servers. This may happen via a hacker who breaks into your building or a disgruntled employee with “top secret” documents on their desk.
Information security threats: This type of risk stems from how your business manages its data and assets to protect them from outside threats. When an employee is found to have misused data, this is an information security threat.
Business threats: These types of threats usually stem from a competitor, supplier, or a customer trying to gain an unfair advantage based on your information. With the increase in mobile device usage, it is important to consider the various business threats related to mobile security.
How to have a secrets management strategy that’s based on Zero Trust
The most important part of any secret management strategy is developing a trusted relationship with your employees with sensitive data access. Zero Trust is the foundation of this kind of relationship. In a Zero Trust environment, the trust between a security officer and an employee is based entirely on the employee’s trust in the officer. That’s why it’s crucial to establish a security officer and security policy process in your organization that is clear to every employee.
A Zero Trust secrets management strategy ensures that each employee trusts the security officer and is willing to comply with security policies, even if they have to give up some of their rights. This is essential to help prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data or employees who want to cause damage to the organization.
What is automated secret creation?
The first sign of a cyber attack is unauthorized access to sensitive data. To prevent this from happening, you need to be able to detect any data leaks and revoke access to the data as soon as an unauthorized party is detected. One way to do this is by using automated secret creation.
This option allows an organization to create and automatically generate random passwords for each user and save them in the Externally Controlled Token (ECDHE) database. This way, the passwords are not stored inside the database but are instead stored in the cloud. The critical difference between this and password-based authentication is that a token does not have the same access privileges as the owner.
What is the automatic renewal of secrets?
Another important part of a secrets management strategy is the way you handle passwords. If you store passwords in plain text, there is a high risk that they will be stolen. You can avoid this by using techniques like password hygiene, which involves regularly changing passwords, or by storing them in a more secure way that’s not accessible to everyone.
An effective way to do this is by using automatic secret renewal. This process allows you to associate an expiration date with every password, so if an employee tries to use that password after the specified date, it will prompt them to create a new password.
How to Develop a Secrets Management Strategy for Your Organization
Secrets management is an essential part of a cybersecurity strategy. That is why developing a well-thought-out secret management strategy for your organization is critical. With a clearly defined plan, you can approach the challenge of managing sensitive data in a way that minimizes risk while still providing the necessary benefits. Your organization’s policies and regulations and your industry will also influence your strategy. There are many factors to consider when developing a strategy, including your organization’s goals, needs, culture, and operations.
To develop your strategy, it’s important first to identify the key components that make up a comprehensive security strategy.
Vision: A vision is a big-picture overview of what your organization wants to be and do. It helps you determine your bigger goals and identify a cybersecurity strategy’s impact on your business.
Mission: A mission is an overarching reason your company exists and is why you provide the service or product your customers value most.
Business goals: Your business goals outline where you want to be one year from now. These goals can be as specific as increasing sales by 20% or as general as growing an organization.
Conclusion
Secrets management is an important part of any cybersecurity strategy, but it can be incredibly challenging for small and midsized businesses (SMBs). To make things even more challenging, many different types of cybersecurity threats exist, and it can be difficult to identify all of them. With all of these challenges in mind, you must develop a secret management strategy tailored to your company and implement it as soon as possible.
If you have questions related to this topic, feel free to book a meeting with one of our solutions experts, mail to sales@amazic.com.
