IT plays an important role in keeping an organization running smoothly. Here’s a look at the three common IT errors that can adversely impact a company and ways to avoid them, writes Shwetha Sankari, IT Security Product Consultant from ManageEngine.
Often, the impact of seemingly small parts of an organization are underestimated in their role of keeping business moving. Usually, the importance is not recognized until we see the negative impact of neglect on something seemingly insignificant that we realize our mistake. When it comes to IT management, even small errors can have a major impact on both operability and security.
Tech giants have overlooked the importance of seemingly simple IT tasks such as certificate maintenance, patch management, and secure permission controls, falling victim to data breaches, service downtime, and other repercussions. Below are three of the most common errors that can adversely impact your organization and ways to avoid them.
1. Mismanagement of certificate reinstatements
Recently, Mozilla, the open-source browser company, experienced global outages due to failure to manage certificate renewals – resulting in disabled service for millions of users. The source of the problem was an expired intermediate certificate that was being used internally to digitally sign Firefox extensions. In addition to disabling the extensions for users, the issue also stopped users from re-installing or re-activating Firefox add-ons.
A recent Ponemon reportOpens a new window emphasizes the significant impact that unsecured digital identities can have on organizations. The findings show that 74 percent of IT professionals said that unmanaged security certificates continue to be one of the predominant reasons for unexpected service downtime. As enterprises tech stacks continue to expand, visibility also continues to be an issue: 71 percent of respondents admit they are unaware of the number of keys and certificates their organizations hold.
Though certificate renewal isn’t rocket science, it’s an extremely crucial function. However, it can still be an intimidating, error-prone challenge for administrators to manually manage the expiration dates and timelines of thousands of certificates deployed to hundreds of servers, especially in large enterprises.
Therefore, the best way to deal with this manual scenario is to automate all certificate management operations. Ideally, your organization’s certificate management strategy should help streamline and automate the operations performed in all stages of a certificate life cycle. In addition to discovering all the existing certificates and consolidating them in a centralized repository, an ideal solution should provide a centralized location with the abilities to request and acquire certificates from third-party certificate authorities, deploy the certificates to their respective endpoint servers, and notify administrators when certificates are approaching expiration.
2. Patch management errors
Patch management is one of the most time-consuming and expensive tasks in enterprise IT. However, this recurring administrative process is vital for ensuring up-to-date security maintenance and defense against emerging threats. When enterprises do not have a patching routine in place, it leaves them exposed to a wide range of potential vulnerabilities.
For example, the notorious 2017 Equifax breach was caused by the failure to patchOpens a new window a critical Apache Struts bug that was resolved two months prior. During the congressional hearing, Equifax’s former CEO Richard Smith responded by passing the blame onto one IT person who failed to deploy the patch and pointed out “human error†to be the root cause of the breach stating, “An individual did not ensure communication got to the right person to manually patch the application.â€. It is safe to conclude that the credit agency had no mechanism to automate patch deployment for Apache Struts and perhaps its other applications as well.
Given the industry’s continuously expanding requirements for corporate compliance and governance, automated patch management tools can be an invaluable resource for properly keeping patches up-to-date in a timely manner. Additionally, for successful patch management, IT administrators should first evaluate which functions are most critical to their businesses, and then customize deployment policies to meet their enterprise patching needs.
3. Improper permission controls
Identity and access management (IAM) may appear straightforward to some, but in reality, it can be challenging and open an organization up to internal and/or external threats. One of the commonly used, but often overlooked, areas of IAM is file permissions management, e.g, facilitating granular access to file servers within an Active Directory environment based on user roles.
File servers are crucial assets in an enterprise IT infrastructure because they house large volumes of sensitive data, information, and knowledge. In large organizations with a huge Active Directory environment including full time staff, contractors, vendors, remote workforces, and more, it becomes daunting for administrators to manually regulate user access to file servers and manage permissions.
Common permission control mistakes include granting excessive permissions, assigning group memberships incorrectly, failing to clean up outdated accounts, and data entry errors.
An individual user receiving more permission than needed, such as abilities to view, modify or delete sensitive files can lead to data loss, breaches, modification errors and more. A best practice for permissions, instead of granting full permission to each user, is to employ the principle of least privilege. This allows organizations to have more control over permissions and allows them to grant the minimal amount of privilege needed for a user to manage their role.
To further reduce risks and maintain IT governance, administrators should survey permissions of users and groups before providing additional access. Also, permissions should be provided on a temporary basis as failure to revoke access is another major issue that leads to permissions being abused or misused in the future. Active Directory user entity and behaviors analytics play an important role in managing these permissions in large enterprises.
An automated approach to IT management can support the streamlining of all the above processes and help avoid major issues while also reducing the backlog of admin tasks, providing greater operational efficiency, and bridging communications between internal business departments. Although they all represent seemingly small tasks when looked at individually, the time and effort to manage huge numbers of certificates or large scale patching and file permissions delegation can quickly overload an organization’s IT department. If a mistake does slip through the cracks, the repercussions can be major, especially for organizations dealing with sensitive information or those constantly in the spotlight of the media. Trusted IT automation can ultimately be one of the best ways to preserve an organization’s reputation.