Sony’s security challenges are a warning to all industries

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Sony recently lost millions of credentials and personal user information such as credit cards, addresses, birth dates and other personal details.  In the wake of Sony’s hack attack all organizations should be vigilantly keeping records and reviewing every change taking place within the IT infrastructure.
Past experience has shown hackers use a compromised user account and then spend time in gaining elevated privileges. Once this is accomplished they make small changes over a longer period of time to remain undetected until they are able to gain the access to the data. Most likely the hack attack with Sony probably happened days and weeks ago. You can’t stop the hacking of digital distribution platforms but you can build redundancies into your technical infrastructure that notify administrators immediately of changes taking place within the IT environment to stop malicious activities from becoming a catastrophic event.  A current and consistently revised road map is fundamentally core to keeping your organization agile and ready to best handle any hacking activity.
Being proactive and forward thinking with your technical infrastructure can give administrator and technical leadership the agility to get in front of malicious technical events before they cannibalize the total integrity of your product offerings and services. All it takes is a moment of oversight to lose total reliability. If you haven’t already sat down to update your technical infrastructure then now is the time.

Maintain a secure and informed technical infrastructure with CionSystems.
http://www.cionsystems.com/active-directory-ChangeNotifier.php
http://www.cionsystems.com/active-directory-reporter.php (Notifier & Reporter v2.5 are bundled)
http://www.cionsystems.com/active-directory-SelfService.php (Compatible with on premise and BPOS)

Critical Services Outage

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The recent Amazon cloud services failure has taught us that just moving to the cloud is not the final solution for maintaining a secure and low cost infrastructure. 

The rapid adoption of cloud services will have to take a back step for a while until companies like Amazon can show how it plans to grow beyond its cloud services failure. No matter how many cloud data centers you have or redundancy’s you put in place you are still putting all of your eggs in one basket by not working with multiple cloud services or an on-premise hybrid. Establishing hybrid infrastructures of on premise and cloud based services will most likely remain a primary strategy of larger enterprise customers. I do not think this recent gaffe with Amazon will change the rapid adoption of the cloud for smaller enterprise class users. Some companies can afford the black eye but why take a chance when your company’s credibility is at stake.

 Sites that depend on cloud services should not be blaming the provider of the service but rather themselves for not doing a diligent job planning ahead for this type of event. No matter how many guarantees you receive about the resilience of a cloud service you should always have a backup plan independent of the one making the guarantees.

 http://www.cionsystems.com/

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