Developments over the past few years have seen the enterprise IT landscape change beyond recognition. The burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT) has led to a growing number of different devices being connected to an organisation’s IT infrastructure, and a growing number and variety of applications being used for both business and personal purposes.
A report by Gartner predicted that, by 2020, the rise of the IoT would mean enterprise IT departments will no longer own the devices connected to their infrastructure. Indeed, they may no longer have control over the network itself, or the servers, OS or applications being employed by the end-users.
As a result of this increase in unmanaged access points, enterprise IT systems will find themselves constantly open to compromise, unable to adequately prevent advanced target attacks from finding their way into the infrastructure. However, while many businesses find themselves unable to afford to comprehensibly defend themselves against every new and existing threat, it’s important that IT departments become more proactive in their approach to network security.
Traditional prevention strategies typically rely on an IT department to monitor servers while they work away behind the scenes. While this was a perfectly adequate approach when there were just a few easily monitored access points, the size and scale that the IoT represents means it is no longer a viable strategy.
IT Operations Analytics, or ITOA, could soon become a crucial part in helping businesses add an additional layer of protection against the increasing threats to their infrastructure, endpoints and end-users.
Identified by Gartner as being set to have a major impact on the IT industry, ITOA is a form of real-time analytics that harnesses and processes vast volumes of highly diverse data from the various applications and endpoints across an organisation’s IT infrastructure. Using this data to establish a benchmark, it enables the recognition of anomalies in the behaviour of users and devices, and the identification of deviations from normal behaviour as potentially malicious activity.
By providing a clear view of what’s taking place across the whole infrastructure – particularly from the crucial perspective of the end user – ITOA can offer the key to identifying problems as they occur, and often before a user is aware of them.
There’s an oft-quoted statistic that 80 per cent of security breaches involve end-user devices. With the number of these potentially risky points of access set to increase manifold as the IoT is more widely adopted, there’s a clear need for real-time visibility across these devices and the enterprise IT infrastructure, as opposed to just the back-end.
ITOA solutions are able to complement traditional security monitoring tools, and the insight they provide is crucial in providing full visibility and coverage of an organisation’s IT security and compliance.
If an enterprise is willing to invest in and install systems with ITOA capabilities, then the visibility it enjoys will lead to a much safer and significantly more secure experience with the Internet of Things.
The author is Poul Nielsen, director of strategy, Nexthink.
Poul has over 20 years of executive management experience with a strong background in routes-to-market strategy for hyper-growth.
