In today’s digital age, business face a wide range of security threats that can put their operations, finances, and reputations at risk. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software can help to mitigate these risks and improve your business’s overall security.
Leveraging ERP Security Across Your Organization
In life, we often encounter opposing forces, such as hot and cold, up and down, and good and evil. It’s the latter than can post a challenge, as something meant for good can be exploited for harmful purposes. This duality is evident in the increasing reliance on hosted software as a service (SaaS) environments, specifically in the form of enterprise resource planning solutions.
Despite being a valuable source of data, ERP systems can be vulnerable to cyberattacks. The reason ERP systems have become a prime target for vicious internet threats is pretty straightforward; it all comes down to one factor: the difference between onsite (internal) ERP operations and SaaS-hosted options. When a solution with potentially valuable data is internet-facing, the level of cyber threat to the system and the data it contains increases by 300%.
With this in mind, how can organizations ensure the security of their hosted SaaS ERP solutions?
Introducing the Strength of Enterprise-Grade Software
Fortunately, the law of opposites also applies in reverse. Technology, including cloud-based ERP solutions, can help mitigate the effects of widespread and harmful cyberattacks. A cloud ERP system provides businesses with robust security capabilities without requiring costly investments in hardware or expanding security and IT teams.
Cloud ERP solutions are typically hosted in the vendor’s own data centers or third-party data centers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. In these cases, the vendor is responsible for maintaining, updating, and securing the software—not the customer. Vendors take their security responsibilities seriously, as their reputations depend on their ability to meet rigorous standards and ensure data security for their customers. They perform system maintenance, control access to the equipment, protect against environmental hazards and disasters, and detect and prevent cyberattacks.
This comprehensive protection at an enterprise level provides significant peach of mind. However, the security benefits of modern cloud ERP software go beyond this. Take a look at three additional ways a cloud ERP solution like Acumatica can enhance your company’s security.
1. Secure Your Organization by Reducing Operational Inefficiencies
Cloud-based ERP system can play a significant role in securing your business by reducing operational inefficiencies. By centralizing your business operations into a single, integrated platform, a cloud ERP system can eliminate data silos, reduce manual errors, and enhance the accuracy and consistency of your data.
These benefits can translate into improved security for your business in a few key ways:
- Better data management. With a cloud ERP system, you can store all of your business-critical data in a single, secure location. This can reduce the risk of data breaches that could otherwise occur when information is scattered across multiple systems and applications.
- Improved risk management. A cloud ERP system can provide you with better visibility into your business operations, enabling you to identify potential security risks and take proactive measures to address them.
- Enhanced compliance. Many industries have strict regulatory requirements that businesses must adhere to, and a cloud ERP system can help you stay compliant. By automating key compliance processes and providing robust reporting capabilities, a cloud ERP system can simplify compliance efforts and reduce the risk of penalties for non-compliance.
2. Bettering Security with Expanded Visibility
An ERP system can significantly improve security for your company by providing expanded visibility into your operations. With an ERP system, you can centralize and integrate data across your departments and locations, enabling real-time visibility into your business operations, transactions, and activities.
When you have expanded visibility, you can more quickly and easily identify potential security risks and take proactive measures to address them before they become major problems. You’ll have the tools necessary to monitor and analyze data from multiple sources, check in with trends and abnormalities, and generate alerts when potential security threats are detected.
ERP systems also offer you better access controls, so you can manage user access and permissions, ensuring employees have access to only the data and applications they need to do their jobs. This helps reduce the risk of data breaches caused by unauthorized access.
With a real-time view into your data environment, you can expose vulnerabilities that might otherwise not have been seen on time.
3. Empowering Your Teams to Combat Cybercrime
ERP systems can empower your teams to combat cybercrime by providing them with the tools and information they need to identify and respond to security threats.
With improved data sharing, ERP systems allow teams to share information and collaborate more effectively, enabling them to identify and respond to security threats more quickly. With an ERP system, you teams will be able to access real-time data on all of your business’s essential functions.
ERP systems also feature centralized security monitoring and automated security checks, helping to make it easy to ensure policies are being followed and updates are being made across the entire organization to solidify compliance going forward.
Remember, your company is constantly under attack, so it’s important to educate your employees about cyber-security and the importance of recognizing signs of intrusions and properly responding to threats.
How MIBAR and Acumatica Can Help Enhance Your Business Security
By utilizing the features Acumatica has to offer, you’ll be in a better position to safeguard your company against constant threats and sophisticated cyberattacks. Some of those features include:
- Restricting user logins to specific IP addresses.
- Controlling user access by assigning unique security credentials and enforcing role-based data access.
- Providing a variety of password protection measures (e.g., prompts to change passwords, password complexity requirements, and unique, multi-factor identification options).
- Supplying built-in redundancy in case of a natural disaster or a large network outage.
- Storing Acumatica subscriber data in separate databases and ensuring that all customer workstations are completely segmented.
- Providing an Acumatica URL protected by ICANN DNSSEC standards.
- Using Acumatica’s Advanced Web Application Firewall solution (WAF).
- Applying enterprise-class MDR services to the SaaS environments—proactively preventing malicious cyber threats.
- Supporting and complying with GDPR and other regulatory requirements.
Acumatica also provides 24/7/365 monitoring from a highly trained security operations center.
If your business is not protected by a comprehensive cloud ERP solution, it’s time to learn more about ERP security and see why Acumatica is right for the job.
Our team here at MIBAR will be happy to introduce you to Acumatica’s cloud ERP system, which combines the efforts of your employees with a range of security measures that live directly within the platform itself. Touch base with us today to get a demo!
Additional ERP Resources
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