The cost of Cybercrime is expected to reach almost $24 trillion by 2027. And it's no longer an issue of financial loss or infrastructure damage alone. Cybercrime is a risk to human safety and life.
The issue becomes even more concerning when you recognize the large gaps in businesses' cyber compliance. The gaps are especially prominent in the manufacturing, power, and oil and gas industries.
So how do you close these gaps? We have a solution.
Importance of Regulatory Compliance
Industrial control systems (ICS) and operational technology (OT) compliance are crucial to sealing potential vulnerabilities to financial, reputational and environmental losses from a cyber attack.
With advances in technology, OT in industries is much more software-oriented. Industrial control, building management, physical access control, and fire control systems are highly susceptible to data breaches and unauthorized access.
Implementing a compliance program with OT standards is a sure way to avoid these issues. Likewise, ICS compliance with standards, frameworks, and even established policies is critical in preventing data losses and system malfunctions.
Gaps in Compliance and Audit Failures
As shocking as it may sound, even with sufficient knowledge of the importance of cybersecurity, many organizations have huge cybersecurity compliance gaps that malicious actors can exploit.
Inconsistency in enforcing cybersecurity is one gap. An information technology (IT) environment is dynamic. Users may be onboarding or offboarding, software apps are updating, and new devices are becoming part of the system
continuously. Even a trivial-seeming error in one of these processes can open up the system to cyber threats.
Another common gap arises from misconceptions about IT-OT convergence. When both parties are confused about their specific management and ownership requirements, there's a risk of some avenue being unmanaged because one party thinks the other is responsible for managing it.
Similarly, the excess of manual intervention paves the way for human error. It's often your employees that unintentionally sabotage organizational security. In fact, Verizon's Data Breach Investigation Report found that 82% of breaches in 2022 had a human element.
These shortcomings result in increased audit failures, as organizations fall short of meeting the requirements to pass their audits. Unfortunately, this is common even in organizations with established policies.
After all, a policy can only do so much. If you don't have a strategy and tools for following that policy, you'll always have compliance gaps.
What's the Fix?
As tech advances, cybersecurity attacks are becoming more severe and less noticeable. At a time like this, you need a solution that focuses on vulnerability management rather than vulnerability reporting alone.
What we are doing at Novaigu is finding new methods to empower cybersecurity teams by uncovering hidden correlations and insights to keep you a step ahead of malicious actors through proactive layered defense rather than the reactive solutions and measures, want to know more? Let's start a conversation!