Driving Collaboration with Microsoft enterprise risk management strategy to enhance business offerings
Most companies have set routines for determining whether new projects should be financed and allocated to them. However, in agile companies, leadership is inverted. The top leaders’ role is to serve those who are closest to the market. They can pave the path for potential new ideas and provide necessary resources to innovation teams.
The reach goes beyond protection as insider risk management requires multiple viewpoints and cooperation among the organization’s main stakeholders.
As a Microsoft services provider, our insider risk management approach is focused on insights from legal, privacy, and HR departments. This also includes security professionals and data scientists. Enterprise will use AI and machine learning to sift through vast signals to identify potential insider threats.
Innovation proposals are not evaluated once or twice a year by a management committee in nimble companies. Rather than that, they are constantly reviewed, refined, and — if necessary — killed. The objective is for only the most brilliant ideas to survive. Our study revealed that the effectiveness of collaborative vetting is contingent on at least two factors.
The disrupted work climate has forced companies to find new ways to allow their employees to function remotely.
And this has changed both the organizational and security landscape. Managing insider threats, a dynamic undertaking even before the pandemic, and even more so in the current remote or hybrid work climate, is one of the top areas of concern.
Extending this partnership beyond Microsoft was also essential for us. For example, Microsoft has collaborated with Carnegie Mellon University to bring insider risk knowledge and experience to provide insights into the broader landscape’s essence for the past few years.
The Change in the Workplace Environment
The new workplace environment provides revolutionary technologies that workers enjoy, enabling them to connect with agility, collaborate, and create. The secret to creating a diverse, inclusive workplace and growing efficiency is to trust the workers in this environment.
An employee’s challenges can infringe that confidence negligently by unintentionally leaking sensitive information on corporate communication channels. The idea of sustainable innovation is founded on the senior management’s vision for the business. It is dependent on financial metrics, which are better at explaining the past than forecasting the future.
The vision is one of future nurturing. It must be accompanied by a procedure that allows the business to capitalize on ecosystem possibilities. This is a description of sustainable innovation that is concerned with the engineering of the future. It entails allocating adequate resources and successfully adjusting organizations. It is based on its external world, history, accomplishments, capabilities, and failures.
For example, genuinely malicious insiders do things such as purposely robbing your intellectual property, removing security controls, or bullying others. But there are even more cases where an insider does not even know that they are threatened or breach the rules while using Microsoft office 365 services.
Preparing an Action Plan
Ultimately, to pursue the right course of action, it is necessary to see the activities and communications that have taken place in the sense of intent. By leveraging knowledge and machine learning, the only way to do this effectively and on a scale is because human-driven processes cannot keep up and are not always that precise. Practical cooperation across security, HR, legal, and enforcement, and a balanced approach to privacy and risk management is needed for a holistic solution to this issue.
Partnering with Microsoft resellers allows the enterprise to experiment with novel ways of defining insider risk indicators. Inputs to the research-informed product roadmap are the results of such experiments. For example, CSE’s data scientists and analysts have been looking at using Microsoft 365 Defender threat data to obtain knowledge that can be used to handle insider threats.
Exfiltration detection to rival: This query allows businesses to identify malicious insider instances creating a file archive but instead email the library to an externally coordinated “competitor.” Efficient query usage calls for previous knowledge of email addresses that could pose a danger for the business if data is forwarded to those addresses.
Exfiltration detection following termination: This question looks at instances in which a terminated person (a person with an imminent termination date but who has not left the company) can download several files from a network address of a non-domain.
Steganography exfiltration detection: This query identifies instances of malicious users attempting to produce steganographic images and then navigates to a webmail URL immediately.
To determine the indication of a malicious event through the co-occurrence of –
- Generating an image steganography image, additional investigation is required; and
- Browsing a webmail URL.
As these queries show, industry collaborations allow us to enrich our intelligence with other organizations’ depth of knowledge. It helps businesses solve some of the more significant challenges of insider risks through the product while more quickly delivering scientifically validated solutions through this open-source library to our customers.
