As the name suggest “Digital Footprint”, it’s the unique traces of your digital presence. As per wikipedia, “ Digital Footprint refers to one’s unique set of traceable digital activities, actions, contributions and communications that are manifested on the Internet or on digital devices.” Here in this blog we will emphasise on how to manage enterprise digital footprint.
An Enterprise Digital Footprint, is an inventory of all the digital assets over internet (web, mobile, individual, social etc) related to an enterprise. In other words, it represent the unique traces of its digital presence like domains, subdomains, IPs, Applications, etc shared over internet intentionally or unintentionally.
We can divide Enterprise digital footprints in 2 categories same as individual digital footprint:
1- Active Digital Footprints: When personal data is released intentionally (Like in Social Media Pages, known Domains, Subdomains, IPs, Applications etc) – Known Unknowns
2- Passive Digital Footprints: When personal data is collected without owner’s knowledge i.e. shared unintentionally. For example, Local departments like marketing launching a website , cloud/SaaS app bypassing IT and security teams causing no official record of this digital asset or IT puts some application online and forget it to shut it down – Unknown Unknowns
Why Managing Digital Footprint Is Important?
Organisations in digital age are competing based on their technology innovation and how fast are they adopting these new technologies. However, this business need of faster technology adoption causes departments to bypass IT and security teams while launching new application, buying new domains, subdomains etc. or they launched some application but forget it to put it offline, Which in turns exposes the digital attack surface with softer targets for attackers/hackers.
For large enterprise, the unknown digital assets are in hundreds or thousands, can easily find out by novice hackers as well. They have easy way go in and out since not monitored. So, it’s important to know what an attacker can see about your organisation i.e. how you look from outside.
You can’t protect what you don’t even know. So, once you have the inventory of you enterprise digital footprint. Now you can prioritise your Digital Assets. After prioritisation, you take actions to make sure that your all of your external digital assets are secured.
4 Steps To Manage Your Enterprise Footprints:
- Discover Enterprise Digital Footprints
- Create an Inventory of all your external Digital Assets
- Prioritise the digital assets to take actions required to secure digital attack surface
- Monitor Enterprise Digital Footprints Continuously
FireShadows Digital Foot-printing and Shadow IT Discovery Platform can help organisations discover and map the digital assets which are exposed to internet intentionally or unintentionally. Once you have the inventory of digital assets, Platform helps you to monitor the digital assets as per your business needs. Also with the differential reporting features, You will be notified once some new digital asset is exposed to internet.
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