Enterprise Cybersecurity Is Like Building Castle Walls, But Everyone Has A Key

Your company’s systems and network are like a medieval fortress. You’ve built your stone walls, lined them with archers and prepared your pikemen for the threat of an invading force, only to discover the enemy has already infiltrated and killed the king. Why spend all that time strengthening the fortress walls, then giving everyone a key to the castle?

Cybersecurity is one of the main topics on every CISO’s mind. There is an ever-present threat to a business’s digital security that generates an inability to get complete peace of mind with regard to data breaches and cyber attacks. No company wants to be the next victim.

Identity and access management is still built around the username and password architecture, however, a talented team of hackers with the right tools and a little patience will be able to crack even the strongest passwords.

Using such a system, a breach is inevitable, and many companies are missing some key pieces of the security puzzle. Information Security teams need to remember that not all threats are coming through their network from outside sources. For many companies, the biggest threat isn’t a hacker located in an Internet cafe halfway across the planet, it’s their own employees. Between inside jobs and simple mistakes, human beings are fallible, and thus still the biggest challenge that security teams have to tackle.

The only way to eliminate the human factor as a threat is to implement a solution that truly proves the identity of the person logging into the system. Usernames and passwords only authorize access, but biometrics authenticate the human being behind that access request, requiring proof that they are who they claim to be. For any enterprise, this is a critical step in putting real protections in place. Firewalls and other security tools will strengthen the castle walls and are a necessity, but we have to take away the keys to the gates that everyone has and post a guard that knows everyone by name, face, and fingerprint with continuous multifactor authentication using biometrics.

Rather than continuing to put our companies at risk, maybe it’s time to change the way we think about security. You should strengthen the walls of your fortress, but you also need to deploy guards that can actually protect access to the castle.