Misuse of business apps key concern for enterprise security leaders, report

Insider threats and abuse of enterprise solutions by employees has become one of the key concerns for IT security leaders. 80% of organisations have reported employee misuse or abuse of access to business applications, according to a report by US-based identity security solutions provider CyberArk.  

The global survey of over 900 enterprise security leaders showed that organisations continue to operate with limited visibility into user activity, although there is a prevalent risk of insider threats and credential thefts. Nearly half of the respondents cited that they had limited ability to view user logs and audit user activity, which could leave blind spots for catching risky behaviour in user sessions, the company said.

“Today, any user can have a certain level of privileged access, making it ever more important that enterprises add security layers to protect the entire workforce as part of a comprehensive Identity Security strategy and Zero Trust framework.” Said Gil Rapaport, general manager, Access Management, CyberArk.

The report also found that in over 70% of the organisations, the average end-user had access to more than 10 business applications that contained valuable data.

Among the three most concerning applications that organisations cited were IT service management applications such as ServiceNow, cloud consoles such as Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google Cloud Platform and marketing and sales-based applications such as Salesforce.

About 44% of organisations said that they need to enable the same security controls across all applications even amid disparate built-in application controls. 41% said better visibility would enable to identify the source of a security incident more quickly.