A Wake-Up Call for Comprehensive Cybersecurity

A Sobering Incident

On 5 June 2024, the NHS declared a ‘critical incident’ following a crippling cyber-attack that has reverberated across London hospitals. The attack led to the postponement of vital operations and blood tests. This incident underscores the urgent need for robust cybersecurity measures to protect critical healthcare infrastructure from increasingly sophisticated cyber threats.

The Cybersecurity Solution: Integrating Secret Management, Vulnerability Scanning and Remediation

In the wake of such alarming incidents, it is essential to adopt a proactive and comprehensive approach to cybersecurity. A robust solution involves the integration of data protection, vulnerability remediation, and configuration management to fortify defence and streamline security management.

Secure your secrets

One of the primary vulnerabilities in any IT infrastructure is the exposure of sensitive information. Secrets management software can address this issue by serving as a centralized store for all secrets, including API keys, passwords, certificates, and other critical data. Secret management software helps significantly improve an organisations security posture, streamline workflows, and reduce the risk of data breaches.

Recommendation:  With HashiCorp Vault, secure, store, and tightly control access to tokens, passwords, certificates, and encryption keys for protecting secrets and other sensitive data using a UI, CLI, or HTTP API.

Respond rapidly

The stakes for vulnerability scanning, runtime protection and swift security patching have never been higher. Cloud apps move fast – code can be pushed to production multiple times per day. This means that security gaps stemming from vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and other issues can be opened equally as fast. For many organisations, the more they move to cloud-based applications, the more the attack surface area continues to grow. The focus is not just preventing the attacks before they happen but stopping them as they happen.

Recommendation: Aqua Security solutions secure applications wherever you develop and run them – across clouds, container and serverless platforms, CI/CD pipelines, registries, DevOps tools and modes of deployment, orchestrators, all the way to Security, SIEM, and Analytics.

Automate configuration management

Automated configuration management offers several key advantages that significantly improve an organization’s security posture – maintaining consistent and secure setups across the IT estate, reducing human error and enabling real-time monitoring of system configurations for deviations from the desired state, allowing for faster detection and remediation of potential security issues.

Recommendation: Market-leading solutions such as Red Hat Ansible and Puppet by Perforce reduce the attack surface, improve response times to security threats, and provide greater visibility and control over system configurations.

Enhance your cybersecurity position with WM Promus

The recent NHS cyber-attack serves as a stark reminder of the critical importance of robust cybersecurity measures. WM Promus possesses the expertise and experience to implement advanced technologies effectively. Our professional consultation services are designed to strengthen your IT estate, ensuring that your organization is well-protected against cyber-attacks. Don’t wait for a crisis to take action— contact us today to fortify your cybersecurity defence and safeguard your critical infrastructure.

Eileen O’Mahony
General Manager, WM Promus