Secure Research Data
Store, share and protect your most most valuable asset with Proacts secure data solutions.
The Challenge
Research funding is a cornerstone of UK Universities, the funding enables Universities to undertake cutting-edge studies, facilitate ground-breaking discoveries, and attract Government, Industry and International funding.
Today all information is stored electronically making this type of data highly attractive to Cybercriminals both external and internal. IT staff are in a constant battle to prevent unauthorised access to this valuable information while ensuring it is available to those that need it.
What makes Research data attractive?
- Intellectual Property Theft: University research often yields valuable intellectual property, including patents, innovative technologies, and proprietary processes. The goal of the Cybercriminal is to try to monetize it through various means, such as holding it to ransom, or selling it on the black market to others looking to gain a competitive advantage.
- Commercial and Economic Gain: State-sponsored actors or corporate competitors may target University research to gain insight into cutting-edge advancements that could be exploited for economic or strategic advantage. By getting access to research data, cybercriminals can bypass years of research and development and save significant resources.
- Ransomware and Extortion: Cybercriminals may encrypt or otherwise compromise University research data and demand a ransom for its release. The thinking is Higher education institutions may be more likely to pay to recover their data quickly and avoid reputational damage.
- Advanced Research: Research data related to defence technologies, healthcare advancements, energy innovations, or critical infrastructure is highly sort after.
- Computing Power: Universities often have substantial computing resources that can be targeted for hijack for malicious purposes, such as distributing malware, launching DDoS attacks, or mining cryptocurrency using stolen processing power.
The Solution
Given the potential impact and value of University research data, it is crucial for institutions to prioritise cybersecurity efforts. We can take the burden of protecting your most valuable research data, no matter where it is located. Backed by our 24×7 Network and Security Operations Centres, we provide a technology and process air-gap which ensures you have comprehensive protection against system failures and lateral movement of threat actors.
Building a secure architecture with technical, identity and process separation can significantly reduce the impact of any attack.
Our expert teams have extensive experience in creating secure by design architectures, drawing experience from some of the most secure sectors in the UK. By combining a secure design with our backup and Disaster Recovery (DR) services, you can minimise the impact of any incident and ensure continued research support and we can help you ensure data is encrypted at rest and in transit.
Tailored Design
Risk Assessment
Strategic Roadmap
Layered Protection
Our services and solution around advanced firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and strategic network segmentation, provide enhanced network security and protection of your data.
Advanced Firewalls: Cutting-edge firewalls designed to filter and monitor incoming and outgoing network traffic, utilising sophisticated rule sets, deep packet inspection, and threat intelligence integration.
Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS): Going beyond traditional prevention, our strategy incorporates IDS that actively monitor network traffic for unusual patterns or suspicious activities. By leveraging behavioral analysis and anomaly detection, our IDS identifies potential breaches in real time, allowing swift mitigation before they escalate.
Strategic Network Segmentation: By dividing your network into isolated segments, we minimise the lateral movement of threats within your infrastructure. This containment strategy not only limits the impact of potential breaches by limiting lateral movement but also enhances overall network resilience.
Zero Trust Networking: The principle of zero trust, ensures that every device and user is treated as untrusted until proven otherwise. This approach mandates rigorous authentication, access controls, and continuous monitoring, reducing the attack surface and mitigating risks of insider threats.
Traffic Encryption: Data privacy is paramount. Our strategy emphasises traffic encryption, ensuring that sensitive information remains secure even when traversing the network.
Data protection is a defensive, in-depth conversation and starts with the design of the primary platform used to store and process data. Building a secure architecture with technical, identity and process separation can significantly reduce the impact of any attack.
The 3-2-1 Rule:
3 Copies of Data – Maintain three copies of data—the original, and at least two copies.
2 Different Types of Media – Use two different storage media types to prevent loss due to media failure.
1 Copy Offsite – Keep one copy offsite to prevent the possibility of data loss due to a site-specific failure.
We see a lot of innovation recently with data protection, new and existing vendors have been driving development to extended this protection further. Many now offer options including an Immutable copy – a copy that cannot be deleted, or an Air-gapped copy – data held on a segregated network not Data accessible from the primary location, and also a Verified copy – backup has been scanned and verified.
Our experts can help ensure devices used to access data including laptops and mobile devices are protected with up to date anti-virus and meet the minimum security policy requirements. In today’s interconnected and ever-evolving digital landscape, ensuring the security of endpoints has become a paramount concern for businesses and individuals alike.
Endpoints, including laptops, desktops, mobile devices, and servers, are the frontline access points to your critical data and systems. Our expert-driven approach to endpoint security recognises the need for a multi-layered defense strategy, capable of countering the increasingly sophisticated cyber threats that target these devices.
Visibility across systems is key. Cyber incidents usually follow a pattern, being able to detect anomalies before they turn into a full scale attack.
A comprehensive logging and monitoring program using SIEM tooling and our Security Operations Centres to provide
Complete Visibility: Capturing and centralising data across systems and networks for a holistic view.
Behavioural Analysis: Identifies and spot anomalies in the early stages, for proactive threat detection.
Threat Intelligence: Our security analysists use real-time feeds to correlate intelligence data with security logging for faster identification of threats on the network
AI-Powered: Machine learning uncovers hidden patterns, enabling us to spot potential threats.
Early Warnings: Alerts trigger rapid investigation, escalation and response, ensuring timely threat containment.
Compliance Focus: Comprehensive logging supports compliance and audit trail requirements mandated by most regulatory bodies.
Data classification is the cornerstone of effective data management and security. It involves categorising data based on its sensitivity, value, and regulatory requirements. By assigning labels such as “confidential,” “public,” or “internal use only,” organisations can establish clear guidelines for data handling, access controls, and encryption. This practice ensures that sensitive information receives the highest level of protection, reducing the risk of breaches and unauthorised access.
Data classification aids in compliance with industry regulations and helps prioritise resource allocation for security measures. Through systematic data classification, we can help organisations proactively secure their digital assets and maintain the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of their information.
We provide our customers with a fully tested DR solution, allowing you to recover quickly. Whether your data is in your data centre, in our Hybrid Cloud platform or in the public cloud, our fully-managed service will ensure you can continue to keep your research data secure and accessible.
Benefits of our DRaaS include:
Gain peace of mind – We’ll regularly test your data recovery and have a validated recovery plan.
Flexible service – We can protect your data, regardless of platform, technology or location.
Save money – Our affordable DRaaS allows you to recover without the need for an expensive second site.
Increase your resilience – Should the worst happen, we’ll help you recover rapidly following the loss of your primary systems or a ransomware attack.
Enhance your business continuity – You can be safe in the knowledge that your data and systems are fully recoverable off-site.
Our experts can assist you develop a plan for if the worst happens. What systems are critical to the operation of the University, How will you operate when your core infrastructure is effectively a crime scene and cut off from the outside world, lifeboat systems to recover onto, validating recovered data to ensure you are not recovering compromised data.
Navigating the complexities of cybersecurity demands a well-structured Cyber Incident Response Plan.
We work with our clients to identify critical systems vital to your operations, ensuring their resilience. We’ll establish protocols for operating in the event of your core infrastructure becoming unavailable due to cyber (or other disaster) Our strategy encompasses lifeboat systems that facilitate recovery and a meticulous validation process to ensure the integrity of recovered data. With our guidance, you’ll be well-equipped to address cyber incidents with a proactive and resilient approach and demonstrate to external regulators you have the right controls in place.
We can help you keep systems up to date, missing patches allow exploitation of known vulnerabilities. Our service management offerings extend to robust vulnerability discovery and remediation through comprehensive patching services for your systems and servers. Our experts are dedicated to ensuring your digital infrastructure remains secure by meticulously identifying vulnerabilities and applying essential patches.
By addressing missing patches, we eliminate the potential for known vulnerabilities to be exploited, safeguarding your systems from potential threats, fortifying your defences by keeping your systems up to date and resilient against emerging risks.
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