The Cloud, The Transformation and The Bad Guys

Marketing is increasingly relying on modern IT environments – including mobile, apps and cloud to improve efficiency. However, these new technologies have dramatically increased the attack surface (defined as all the different potential points of entry into an organization).

Many of the new marketing innovations have been delivered by entrepreneurial companies who understand that marketing traditionally doesn’t get a lot of IT support, so many if not most of these are delivered as web-based or web-enabled applications. But we aren’t buying one application; we are connecting together say, ten of these tools when we go through a new web launch for example. There’s a huge amount of pressure to go fast and we don’t always get the dedicated IT resources we need, so we outsource, get parts from the company’s shared services, or create shadow IT.

Unfortunately, many IT organizations are still putting the majority of their security investments in preventative technologies that aren’t designed to stop every intrusion into this complex, dynamic new cloud infrastructure.

So, there is lots of spending going on and lots of tools being put together, using mostly cloud and some form of outsourced IT. Meanwhile, the IT security organization is busy protecting the enterprise’s core infrastructure. These teams are working really hard, but only 27% of enterprises based on a past RSA study say they actively monitor cloud-based infrastructure as part of their security strategy. And they absolutely can’t monitor and protect systems or applications they don't know exist.

So, who is looking at the security strategy for all of these marketing assets that we just spent all this money to acquire? Yes, security-conscious IT organizations will help us through a security audit for each vendor, but we are connecting the tools together with APIs and the connections are what is concerning. Remember, at some point, all that connects to CRM and ERP, so the modern marketing infrastructure with that marketing automation forms page, it’s a front door to sensitive information.

Realizing this, we as marketing leaders need to do all that we can to be more security-aware and partner with our CIOs and CSOs to be sure we have an end-to-end security strategies for our infrastructure.