Crown jewels like Colonel Sanders’ secret recipe, Google’s search algorithm and the formula for Coca-Cola are all protected under lock and key against the dreaded insider threat. Your organization’s crown jewels might include customer data, proprietary algorithms, supply chain optimization tactics, your own secret recipes and more. Do you know how to protect them?

To answer that question, you must first know where they are and who has access to them. Are you alerted when they are accessed? Do you keep track of whether they have been downloaded, altered or moved? The key is to know your users and your data.

The Right Tools to Identify the Insider Threat

All access is not created equal; the same is true of risk. An employee logging into your network from home during the day is not the same as a former contractor logging in from a coffee shop after midnight. Today, passwords aren’t enough, and context is vital. The ability to dynamically authenticate users, assess the situation and block risky action is critical. Leading security solutions provide the insight and control you need, with capabilities such as:

• Business-centric identity governance, which enables you to grant access privileges and prevent entitlement creep, the process by which users accumulate access privileges over time without shedding the ones they no longer need. It also enables you to provide information regarding user access in ordinary language to help managers understand what access they are granting and why.
• Dynamic access management, which enables you to control access to resources as users seek entry into your data environment and determines whether the users in question legitimately need that access.
• Comprehensive data security, a solution designed to monitor access, analyze risk, prevent unauthorized or suspicious activities, protect sensitive data and fix vulnerabilities in sensitive data repositories. Such a solution can discover and classify sensitive data and uncover compliance risks automatically.
• Intelligent integration of security solutions that work together to take a more aggressive stance against the insider threat in a smarter, safer environment.
• Meaningful insight that enables you to distinguish between normal and anomalous behavior and to support preventive action by creating a baseline of previously executed access commands.

Keep Your Crown Jewels Safe

IBM can help in each of these areas to enable you to protect your crown jewels from inadvertent actors, malicious insider threats and external fraudsters. Watch the on-demand webinar to find out how.