Across the Hospitality & Leisure sector, more and more data is generated and stored than ever before, throughout every stage of the guest experience. From the initial check-in, to accessing amenities, and post-visit engagement, the modern guest experience is truly interconnected, offering hospitality professionals numerous opportunities to build brand loyalty and develop powerful USPs. It's a transformative time for the sector as a whole, but these growing volumes of data present an extremely attractive target for bad actors. We just have to look at the growing number of high-profile breaches in recent years - where the targets have been left unable to trade and forced to contend with operational disruption, financial penalties, and reputational damage – to see the potentially irreparable effects of such attacks.
It's no surprise that guests expect concrete reassurance that their data will remain secure throughout the duration of their stay and beyond. As a result, organisations across the sector are investing in their cyber security ecosystems, phasing out legacy systems in favour of Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) platforms that provide fully centralised control and visibility of highly dispersed sites.
The challenge here is that the right digital investments are just the first step towards developing a robust cyber security posture. As seasoned hospitality professionals will already be very much aware, when people and technology come together, great things happen. And it's the same with cyber security.
SIEM and SOAR platforms provide rich veins of actionable, real-time security data in the form of logs, alerts, and analytics. However, far too many organisations investing in such platforms fail to consider how this data will be acted upon, and how a real security alert will be managed. Indeed, in many cases, their internal IT teams simply lack the time and resources to do so - a situation compounded by the growing diversity of cyber security portfolios, where multiple platforms from different providers have been integrated.
This is where a Security Operations Centre (SOC) becomes essential. A world-class SOC combines skilled analysts, defined processes, and supporting technologies to monitor, investigate, and respond to potential threats in real time. Without this operational layer, the expected ROI of digital platforms all-too-often fails to materialise, and in a worst-case scenario, the lack of defined processes may even lead to a security breach going undetected.
However, for many hospitality providers, building and maintaining an effective SOC in-house can be prohibitively challenging, and so there is a strong case to be made for implementing managed SOC services, as many across the sector have already found. Here, trusted partners' own specialists provide round-the-clock monitoring and response, acting as an extension of internal teams. This approach allows organisations to develop a stronger, more agile security posture, while simultaneously enabling internal resources to remain focused on delivering exceptional guest experiences.
So, if you're in any doubt about your overall security posture - whether that's systems, processes, or both - don't hesitate to contact us. Based on a thorough evaluation of your existing systems and processes, we will work closely with you to design, deploy, and maintain a cyber ecosystem that fully supports your day-to-day operations, freeing you to focus on delivering seamless, exceptional experiences for every guest, every time.
A comprehensive overview of digital transformation for the entire Hospitality & Leisure sector.
In a heightened cyber threat landscape - where ransomware attacks are increasing in frequency and sophistication - and having weathered the challenges of COVID-19 and the resulting move to hybrid working, the Finance sector is still continually challenged to demonstrate to its customers that critical services will remain available no matter what, and that sensitive financial data will remain fully secure at all times.
In light of recent geopolitical events, and the increased threat to corporate infrastructure, organisations across the UK must assume that they will be forced to contend with a cyber-attack in the near future and prepare accordingly. Indeed, the NCSC has already set out its own guidance to help organisations bolster their defences, which we strongly advise you to read and implement.
In light of numerous dramatic shifts in the geopolitical landscape in recent months, this blog has reiterated the need for organisations across all sectors to strengthen and - if necessary - reconsider their cyber security postures, in order to prepare for the anticipated attacks by global bad actors. The legal sector is no exception, particularly as these attacks are anticipated to specifically target the most high-value data.
The UK's Legal sector must contend with some of the most stringent compliance and data protection obligations in the current digital landscape. For many years, this has hindered the progress of digital transformation initiatives within firms, but in recent years, in order to meet the challenges of COVID-19, many firms have seized the opportunity to modernise cumbersome legacy systems and develop cutting-edge IT infrastructure that enables their staff to work more flexibly.
In spite of the ongoing evolution of cyber security processes and technology, human error is still responsible for 95% of data breaches1. Phishing attacks alone represent a particularly insidious risk, with 91% of organisations experiencing a successful attack in 2021 alone2.
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