Do you handle sensitive data via SaaS? Here are five major risks you need to consider

The landscape is changing rapidly, as AI and the rapid political shifts in the U.S. and Russia are affecting the entire industry. It is now more important than ever to maintain control over your data and to adopt a risk-driven approach. Here are five risks you need to monitor—and actively address—to avoid serious incidents that could impact your entire organization:

Your subcontractors are your responsibility—not someone else’s

Currently, there are many regulations in place to ensure that services and products are delivered in a sustainable and secure manner. Some of the most common include GDPR, DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act), NIS (Network and Information Systems), and the Swedish Public Access to Information and Secrecy Act (OSL).

Failure to comply with these can have a range of serious consequences; ultimately, it can even lead to fines or business bans. With the rise of AI, additional regulations—such as the AI Act—are emerging, making it even more complex to comply with the rules, since AI models are often trained using companies’ most sensitive data.

SECURE YOUR DATA: Read more about the all-Swedish cloud service provider Elastx here!

The trend is also moving toward you having to keep track of your own subcontractors. You can no longer get away with blaming them if something goes wrong.

It’s not a question of if—but when—you’ll be targeted by a cyberattack

Organized cybercrime is skyrocketing, and no one can hide anymore. If your company has an exposed vulnerability or isn’t actively working to raise security awareness among your employees, you’ll be targeted sooner or later. The goal is usually to cause harm, disrupt operations, or make money from the attacks. Depending on the type of service you provide, the threat landscape and the measures required can vary significantly.

Here, too, much depends on which internal or external individuals and organizations you can trust. In your risk assessment, you should consider:

• Regulations, such as Swedish, European, or U.S. law
• Certifications, such as ISO 27001
• The number of people who have access to data, including any subcontractors (processors)
• Security culture (this can be difficult to assess)
• Technical safeguards

Technical safeguards such as encryption can immediately reduce the risk of sensitive data leaks. However, the most common method used by cybercriminals is manipulating employees. Therefore, all staff must receive regular training and work with a risk-driven mindset on a daily basis, with clear processes in place in case a vulnerability is discovered.

Ensure the Availability of Your Service

If your services are unavailable, you are of little use to your customers. You may even cause direct harm. That is why there are various scenarios you want to prevent when it comes to availability:

• Physical failures, where components or perhaps entire data centers become unavailable. This is prevented through redundancy at various levels.
• Logical failures such as a cyberattack, a bug, or human error. These can cause a service to go down or data to be destroyed. In the worst-case scenario, the data cannot be recovered if backups are missing or defective. In a ransomware attack, the attacker attempts to locate your backups and encrypt them as well to force you to pay a ransom. This is prevented by tested processes for backing up changes and restoring data. You need a way to ensure that your backups cannot be deleted or modified.
• Overload, where services become so heavily loaded that they slow down or stop working entirely. This can be due to higher-than-usual traffic, a feature requiring more capacity than anticipated, or a cyberattack deliberately overloading the service—a so-called DDoS attack. This is prevented by load testing the service so that you know it can handle the expected load, that the service—preferably automatically—can scale up as needed, and that DDoS protection is in place.

Ensure the integrity of your data

How do you know that the data you have is accurate and reliable? Data can be manipulated by people, bugs, or faulty components. However, such a scenario can be prevented at multiple levels. If data becomes corrupted due to components or bugs, there are file systems, object storage solutions, or databases that detect this and alert you if the data is incorrect.

If the system cannot correct this, the data must be restored. If data is altered by a person or a bug, it can be more difficult to detect. In such cases, traceability combined with monitoring may be the most effective way to verify this. An important detail is that the logs used for traceability must not be manipulable.

Protect Your Brand – Choose the Right Suppliers

Many of the threats already discussed can damage your brand, but it’s also important that the suppliers you work with uphold the same values you do. If sustainability—both environmental and social—is important to you, then require that your suppliers and partners adhere to these standards as well. If your suppliers do not meet your own standards, it can ultimately damage both your brand and your corporate culture.

Elastx helps companies achieve digital sustainability and sovereignty

At Elastx, we work on these issues every day and help our customers store and process data in the most secure way possible:

“What we at Elastx mean by digital sustainability is sustainable digital development based on three dimensions: social, environmental, and economic. Like the global Sustainable Development Goals, but from a digital perspective. Digital sovereignty is about having control over your own data. An important aspect of this is avoiding vendor lock-in. Something that helps with this is open standards and open source code, which allow you to choose where you want to run your service, from “on-premises” to various cloud platforms. By thinking things through and making conscious strategic choices based on the risks mentioned above, you’ve come a long way,” says Joakim Öhman, CEO and founder.