9 Pressing IT Security Challenges – and How to Mitigate Them

The list of threats that keep IT security professionals up at night can seem almost endless – and it gets longer every day. With the transformation and digitization of business, IT security has never been more important or under more pressure from both internal and external sources. These challenges include:

1. The number and intensity of outside security attacks continues to grow.
2. Thanks to shadow IT, sensitive data now lives everywhere.
3. Unused, inactive, and/or unidentified devices open penetration points for security attacks.
4. Third-party software, open source inventory, and unsecured assets outside the data center introduce new risk.
5. Regulatory standards continue to evolve, often with poorly defined processes that IT security teams must manually address.
6. Failure to meet compliance standards puts IT and the business at risk for time-consuming audits and expensive fines.
7. Business expectations continue to skyrocket, from the C-suite to individual users.
8. Information remains stuck in silos, so security and operations teams rely on outdated processes.
9. Outdated processes translate to poor service quality, unnecessary business downtime, and an environment that can’t scale with today’s multi-cloud reality.

This list is just the beginning, but the items on it have one thing in common: they can be addressed by the right IT asset discovery tool, like BMC Helix Discovery. While asset discovery and dependency mapping may seem tangential to IT security, it actually reduces risk across your organization by providing a confident and complete view of your data center and multi-cloud ecosystems.

How does visibility impact security? BMC Helix Discovery offers deep insight into your full infrastructure – from data center servers, cloud services, network, and storage to the mainframe. It gives you the information and insight you need to resolve known vulnerabilities with the least amount of risk while enabling faster response to security threats. With increased visibility and automation, you can proactively identify trends, abnormalities, and security vulnerabilities and remediate them before they impact the business.

BMC Helix Discovery specifically benefits IT security teams with five key features:

1. Streamlined data inventory to identify blind spots and unscanned systems and enable rapid assessment of known vulnerabilities.
2. Deep business service awareness when assessing and remediating vulnerabilities in key infrastructure and cloud resources.
3. A single point of reference for visualizing and reporting on resources in a distributed environment.
4. Full coverage of a distributed environment aligned with key business infrastructure to bridge the SecOps gap and provide more valuable reporting and remediation.
5. Application and business service context to security alerts via integration with your SIEM solutions.

Asset discovery and dependency mapping may traditionally be the realm of IT Ops, but it plays an increasing role in a holistic approach to both security and operations. Learn more about how BMC Helix Discovery mitigates risk, reduces business impact, and solves IT security challenges in the solution brief, Security Starts with BMC Helix Discovery: Reduce risk across your distributed environment with greater visibility, automation, and insight.

These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.

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