What is Enterprise Cybersecurity?

Enterprise cybersecurity is the comprehensive application of tools, technologies, policies, processes, controls, and procedures designed to protect large-scale corporate networks, devices, systems, and applications from sophisticated digital attacks. These attacks targeting businesses are aimed at accessing, destroying, and altering sensitive corporate data, disrupting business workflows, extorting money, and compromising operations at an organizational level.

Cyber criminals deploy a broad range of attack types against enterprises and individuals in order to compromise data confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

• Attacks on confidentiality are designed to steal sensitive information such as PII and corporate intellectual property.
• Attacks on integrity are meant to sabotage business operations and inflict reputational damage.
• Attacks on availability aim to prevent users from accessing business-critical data.

At the enterprise level, a cyberattack could result in data loss, disruption to operations, ransom demands, industrial espionage, regulator censure and loss of reputation that can impact shareholder value and customer trust.

An integrated, automated approach to cybersecurity and cyber resilience accelerates the detection, remediation, and investigation of cyber threats for enterprise organizations.

Enterprise cybersecurity impact on business

Beyond basic security concerns, enterprise cybersecurity directly impacts business continuity, operational resilience, and stakeholder trust. A robust enterprise security posture helps maintain business operations during cyber incidents, preserves shareholder value, and supports strategic business objectives. For large organizations, cybersecurity is no longer just an IT concern but a critical business function that requires board-level oversight and enterprise-wide integration.

Why is enterprise cybersecurity important?

Why do enterprises need cybersecurity? The importance of enterprise cybersecurity is primarily driven by the following factors.

Increasingly sophisticated attacks targeting enterprises

Attacks are growing in sophistication and scale against large organizations. Distributed denial of service (DDoS), ransomware, advanced persistent threats and state-sponsored hacking have all made the threat landscape more dangerous for enterprise businesses.

Internal threats

Unlike external attacks, which originate from outside the organization (e.g., nation-states, cybercriminal groups), insider threats are initiated by individuals within the organization, such as employees, contractors, or business partners who have authorized access to systems and data. These threats can be malicious (e.g., a disgruntled employee stealing sensitive data) or unintentional (e.g., an employee accidentally exposing confidential information). They are particularly dangerous because insiders often have legitimate access to sensitive systems and data, making their activities harder to detect with traditional perimeter defenses. 

According to the 2024 Insider Threat Report cited in OpenText’s DFIR messaging, 83% of organizations experienced at least one insider attack, and larger-scale insider attacks increased fivefold year over year.

Widely available hacking tools targeting corporate assets

You no longer need to be an uber geek with years of programming experience to pull off a debilitating cyber-attack against a major corporation. The tools and tactics are available online for free. Your cyber attacker today could very well be someone with limited digital skills but significant motivation to target enterprise organizations.

Enterprise compliance requirements

Regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and industry-specific mandates require enterprise organizations to deploy security measures to protect sensitive information. Failure to comply could lead to substantial fines and legal action that can significantly impact enterprise operations.

Rising cost of breaches for enterprises

Fines and lost business are just one aspect of the rising financial costs of security breaches for enterprises. There are also expenses associated with containing the impact, disaster recovery, closing loopholes, acquiring new security systems, and repairing the organization’s reputation in the enterprise marketplace.

Strategic, board-level concern for enterprises

A 2025 study identified cyber-attacks, especially data breaches, as the top business concern for the year ahead. This is further compounded by the string of new regulations that task boards and senior management with driving cyber risk management in enterprise organizations.

Cybercrime is big business

Cyberattacks can have social, ethical, or political motives. Nevertheless, the vast majority are driven by financial intentions. Cybercrime is a multibillion-dollar industry targeting primarily enterprise organizations with valuable data assets. 

What are the challenges of enterprise cybersecurity?

Manipulation of AI systems

Attackers exploit models via prompt injection, data poisoning, or model evasion to bypass defenses, exfiltrate sensitive data, or gain unauthorized access. Because AI often runs autonomously and appears trusted, these attacks can be stealthy and hard to detect.

AI-powered offensive automation

Adversaries use AI to rapidly create phishing campaigns, write malware, craft deepfakes, and scan for vulnerabilities at scale. This makes attacks faster, more convincing, and harder to defend against overwhelming traditional security tools and human analysts.

The rise of non-human identities

Non-human identities, such as service accounts, machine identities, APIs, bots, and automated workloads, are becoming an increasing risk to enterprise cybersecurity. In many organizations, they outnumber human users, and they often run with excessive or poorly governed privileges. Unlike human accounts, non-human identities are frequently not rotated, poorly monitored, or insufficiently deprovisioned when systems change, leaving long-lived access points across on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. Attackers are leveraging these unmanaged credentials to move laterally, escalate privileges, and exfiltrate data, often in ways that evade traditional identity or behavior-based detection controls. As organizations accelerate automation, DevOps, and AI adoption, the proliferation of non-human identities introduces hidden attack surfaces that necessitate continuous discovery, least-privilege enforcement, and robust machine identity governance as core elements of a zero-trust architecture.

Enterprise-scale IoT deployments

The internet is no longer a network of just routers, switches, servers, computers, and printers. It is rapidly giving way to the IoT. Numerous electronic and electric devices are internet-enabled, including industrial control systems, manufacturing equipment, supply chain sensors, and enterprise-level connected infrastructure.

While the IoT has created innumerable opportunities for connectedness, it has also introduced gaps of unprecedented scale and number in enterprise environments. There are far more potential entry points for attack. Cyber criminals can take over thousands of these devices to unleash a DDoS attack against enterprise targets.

Rapidly evolving risks for enterprise systems

Information technology is arguably the fastest evolving industry in the world. Technology that was state-of-the-art five years ago could be teetering on the brink of obsolescence today. With new technologies come new dangers and new avenues of attack, making it challenging for enterprise organizations to keep pace and update their practices accordingly. This is even true for large enterprises with dedicated IT, security, and compliance teams.

Collection of large quantities of confidential enterprise data

Enterprise organizations capture, process, and store enormous quantities of confidential information from users and business operations—a significant proportion of which might be deemed sensitive. Even mid-sized enterprises can find themselves in possession of thousands of customer records in just a couple of months.

With more information in their hands, the risk of a cyber-criminal stealing the data is an ever-present concern for enterprise security teams.

Organized and state-sponsored hacker groups targeting enterprises

Cyberattacks are no longer the preserve of a computer-savvy individual, clawing away at a company's cyber defenses while confined to a dark basement. Today's threat actors are more systematic and organized, ranging from advocacy groups such as Anonymous to entire government departments dedicated to cyberespionage, cyberwarfare and cyberterrorism, often with enterprise organizations as primary targets.

Remote working in enterprise environments 

Despite well-publicized calls to return to office, according to a 2025 Robert Half survey, fully 80% of U.S. organizations still support either remote or hybrid work and globally the numbers are similar. But remote work comes with cyber risks for enterprise organizations managing thousands of remote endpoints.

Employees who use public Wi-Fi while traveling could connect to a rogue hotspot and expose confidential company information to criminals. Working outside the confines of the office also elevates the risk of eavesdropping and device theft, creating significant challenges for enterprise security teams managing remote access.

High-speed internet facilitating data exfiltration

For decades now, the internet has enabled the real-time exchange of data. Bandwidth has grown dramatically over the years, and high-speed internet is widely accessible, making it possible for rogue actors to upload vast quantities of enterprise data in minutes.

Bring your own device (BYOD) in enterprise environments

BYOD policies lower the cost of acquiring organization-owned devices. However, these same devices can be weak points that introduce malware into the organization. And BYOD might not be subjected to the same degree of oversight and control as enterprise-owned gadgets, creating unique challenges for enterprise security teams managing diverse device ecosystems.

Supply Chain and Third-Party Risks

Enterprise organizations typically maintain extensive business ecosystems with numerous third-party vendors, partners, and suppliers. These relationships create additional attack vectors that require specialized security controls. Supply chain attacks have become increasingly common, where attackers compromise smaller vendors to gain access to larger enterprise targets. Rigorous vendor security assessments, contractual security requirements, and continuous monitoring of third-party access are essential components of enterprise cybersecurity.

Enterprise Security Architecture

An effective enterprise cybersecurity strategy requires a well-designed security architecture that scales with your business. This includes implementing defense-in-depth strategies with multiple security layers, network segmentation to contain potential breaches, and centralized security management for consistent policy enforcement across the organization. Large enterprises need comprehensive visibility across complex IT landscapes that span on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.

Enterprise Regulatory Compliance

Large organizations often operate under complex regulatory frameworks across multiple jurisdictions. Enterprise cybersecurity must address industry-specific regulations such as HIPAA for healthcare, PCI DSS for payment processing, GDPR for EU data protection, and emerging privacy laws. At the same time, regulations and best practices are evolving in real-time, especially in critical areas such as secure and compliant usage of AI. Non-compliance can result in significant financial penalties, legal action, and reputational damage. Enterprise security programs must include comprehensive compliance management with regular audits, documentation, and reporting capabilities to demonstrate adherence to regulatory requirements.

How can I manage enterprise cybersecurity?

You need multiple strategies, techniques, tools, technologies, practices and services to counter cyberattacks. The following are some of the most important pillars of enterprise cybersecurity.

Leadership commitment

Cybersecurity must have conspicuous buy-in at the highest level of the organization. Employees will be committed to causes that have the explicit support of senior management and the board. For enterprise organizations, this means cybersecurity must be a C-suite and board-level priority with clear executive sponsorship.

Regular risk assessments

Regular cyber risk assessments help to identify and evaluate threats, while also determining whether the controls in place are adequate. It's a cost-effective and efficient means of proactively protecting your digital assets. In enterprise environments, these assessments must be comprehensive, covering the entire IT ecosystem including cloud services, third-party integrations, and global operations.

Password management

Develop policies and awareness programs that ensure users create passwords that are difficult to predict. Default passwords should be changed before an application or device is deployed into the production environment. Enterprise organizations should implement privileged access management solutions to secure administrative accounts and implement passwordless authentication where appropriate.

Enterprise-Wide Security Culture

Building a strong security culture across a large organization requires more than occasional training. Enterprise cybersecurity depends on embedding security awareness into every aspect of business operations. This includes role-specific security training, executive-level security leadership, regular phishing simulations, security champions programs, and clear security communication channels. When security becomes part of the organizational DNA, employees become an active defense layer rather than the weakest link.

Most cyberattacks ride on vulnerabilities caused by human error. Weak passwords, phishing emails, scam calls, and malware-laced attachments rely on the actions of a user. Attackers utilize these to trick employees into opening a doorway for unauthorized access.

Every employee must recognize their responsibility as the first line of defense in protecting the organization's digital assets against cyberattack. This must be reinforced through regular training. Cybersecurity should be integrated into the company's values and vision. And there should be incentives and rewards for employees who model the right cybersecurity behavior.

Integrated application and network security solutions 

The best enterprise security software services work in multiple layers to create a solid defense against cyber threats.

Often, an organization will need several applications and network security solutions to do the job, ranging from intrusion prevention systems to antivirus software. Historically, these solutions were deployed in a reactive, siloed stance that proved ineffective, expensive, and complicated. Attackers could exploit gaps.

To have true end-to-end visibility of the threat landscape, applications and network security solutions must be integrated to prevent anything from falling through the cracks, especially in complex enterprise environments with multiple security tools and platforms.

Partner with a dedicated cyber defense company

The complexities of rapidly evolving cyber dangers can be challenging and time-consuming for the average enterprise. Partnering with a dedicated cyber defense company like OpenText enables you to tap into the best cybersecurity knowledge and expertise available.

A cyber defense company can help drive cybersecurity into an organization's fabric and deploy the solutions that are most suitable. Armed with proven cyber resilience software and enterprise security tools, a dedicated cybersecurity solutions provider can keep your security robust.

How do OpenText security offerings help organizations?

OpenText™ Cybersecurity Cloud helps organizations of all sizes protect their most valuable and sensitive information. Our portfolio of end-to-end cybersecurity solutions offers 360-degree visibility across an organization, enhancing security and trust every step of the way.

Our solutions help you:

Anticipate cyber risk with advanced threat visibility, insights, and monitoring.

Protect across identity, data, applications, users, and devices for adaptive security posture management.

Simplify security across business functions, roles, and processes to drive compliance via platform.

Here are some key capabilities:

Application security

Application security begins in your application development process. Testing needs to be scalable, flexible for on-premises or on-demand, and integrate with your development lifecycle. It should include developer-friendly processes and robust security functionality.

OpenText™ Application Security solutions seamlessly integrate into your developers’ preferred tools so they can unearth and resolve security vulnerabilities at every juncture of the software development lifecycle. Deliver on key business objectives while ensuring faster release cycles, more secure applications, and lower development costs.

• OpenText™ Core Application Security: Achieve all the advantages of security testing, vulnerability management, tailored expertise, and support without the need for additional infrastructure or resources.
• OpenText™ Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST): Continuously test live apps to find real-world vulnerabilities with dynamic application security testing (DAST).
• OpenText™ Static Application Security Testing (SAST): Find and fix vulnerabilities in your code early with the most accurate results in the industry.
• OpenText™ Core Software Composition Analysis: Take full control of open source security, compliance, and health with a toolkit that will revolutionize the way you use open source.

Data privacy and protection

Ensuring data security is a primary component of both cybersecurity, cyber resiliency, and compliance. This includes data in both structured and unstructured formats. You need to be able to have visibility and context into the data you have, as well as glean important insights so you can stay compliant with privacy and other governmental regulations.

OpenText™ Data Privacy and Protection solutions equip organizations with a resilient and protected data ecosystem to govern data access, enforce policies, and monitor data usage for compliance. Operationalize security and secure sensitive data with deep analysis and insights to reduce financial risk and comply with privacy mandates.

• OpenText™ Voltage™ Fusion Platform: Discover and protect your most valuable data with end-to-end data security.
• OpenText™ Voltage™ SecureData: Protect high-value data with format-preserving encryption, tokenization, hashing, and masking while keeping it usable for hybrid IT.
• OpenText™ Voltage™ Structured Data Manager: Manage structured data over its lifecycle.

Identity and access management:

Identity and access management (IAM) is a comprehensive, scalable solution designed to manage and secure digital identities while controlling access to critical systems. It ensures the right individuals have appropriate access, minimizing security risks and supporting compliance. By integrating with existing IT infrastructure, OpenText IAM enhances security and operational efficiency across organizations of various sizes and industries, ensuring they meet regulatory obligations.

OpenText Identity and Access Management encompasses a wide range of services, including:

• OpenText™ Access Manager: Enable single sign-on and access across mobile, cloud, and legacy platforms.
• OpenText™ Identity Governance: Protect all data with simplified identity management, compliance, and user access review processes.
• OpenText™ Privileged Access Manager: Centralize privileged user access management and control over admin accounts across your entire IT landscape.
• OpenText™ Identity Manager: Simplify identity lifecycle management to ensure secure resource access.
• OpenText™ Advanced Authentication: Enable passwordless and multifactor authentication for protection.
• OpenText™ Data Access Governance: Gain valuable file insights, secure unstructured data, and prevent unauthorized access.

Threat detection and response:

Together, these functions form a crucial part of an organization's overall cybersecurity strategy, aimed at minimizing the impact of potential security incidents. Threat detection is the process of identifying and recognizing potential security threats, malicious activities, or unauthorized actions within an organization's IT infrastructure. Threat response refers to the actions taken once a threat has been detected. It encompasses the steps and procedures an organization follows to address, mitigate, and recover from a security incident.

OpenText™ Threat Detection and Response solutions leverage robust realtime correlation and AI-powered analytics to help you proactively detect known and unknown threats. With end-to-end visibility, you can quickly find, withstand, and recover from threats and improve your security operations’ efficiency and effectiveness.

• OpenText™ Network Detection and Response: Harness unparalleled network visibility to efficiently hunt for and defend against threats.
• OpenText™ Enterprise Security Manager: Accelerate threat detection and response with real-time detection and native SOAR.
• OpenText™ Core Threat Detection and Response: Proactively detect insider risks, novel attacks, and advanced persistent threats.
• OpenText™ Core Adversary Signals: Get a bird’s-eye view of how attacks are being carried out and what they’re targeting.

Digital investigations and forensics

These offerings quickly and reliably collect and analyze digital evidence to uncover the root cause of an attack, contain the threat, and support compliance or legal actions with defensible reporting.

OpenText™ DFIR products help security teams investigate cyber incidents by providing deep visibility across endpoints, mobile devices, and cloud data, enabling organizations to detect insider threats, trace attacker behavior, collect legally defensible evidence, and reduce downtime and regulatory risk.

• OpenText™ Endpoint Investigator: Conduct internal investigations to discover behaviors that put corporate assets at risk.
• OpenText™ Endpoint Forensics & Response: Investigate, isolate and remediate cyber threats in real time.
• OpenText™ Information Assurance: Conduct defensible data collection and ensure effective information governance.
• OpenText™ Forensic Equipment: Capture, preserve and analyze digital evidence in a forensically sound manner.
• OpenText™ Mobile Investigator: View, analyze and report on mobile evidence involved in an investigation.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning

Threat identification is traditionally a threshold-driven process, involving the discovery of potential threat patterns. Artificial intelligence (AI) for cybersecurity has the capacity to revolutionize this process.

• OpenText™ Threat Detection and Response Aviator: An integral part of OpenText™ Core Threat Detection and Response that automatically generates summaries in natural language to eliminate guesswork and time-consuming research, enriches insights with threat intelligence to boost detection accuracy with high contextual relevancy, and automatically classifies techniques associated with risky activities according to the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
• OpenText™ Fortify™ Aviator: An AI code security tool that executes fast auditing, identification, and automated code fix suggestions for SAST vulnerabilities with the power of AI. It embeds into your dev environment, using AI code analysis to continuously monitor code for security issues, and provides contextual explanations and tailored code fix suggestions.

How can I mitigate enterprise cybersecurity risk?

There are no guarantees that even the most elaborate strategies will keep your enterprise organization immune from attack. However, taking the right actions will substantially minimize the odds by making it harder for cyber criminals to break through. By identifying new vulnerabilities, deploying cybersecurity tools, and educating users, enterprise cybersecurity makes the digital environment safer for all.

A good enterprise cybersecurity strategy protects your systems, your applications, and your data. You need to ensure that only authorized users can access your systems and that you can track them wherever they go through strong identity access management across your enterprise environment. You also need to be able to detect vulnerabilities in your applications and find any weaknesses that might be exploited. Finally, the privacy of your data—information about your customers, your employees, and your organization's intellectual property—must be guarded with the highest levels of security to meet enterprise compliance requirements.

Another component of an effective enterprise cybersecurity strategy is to detect when someone is trying to act maliciously against you. This can be very challenging as bad actors become more sophisticated and work in more covert ways to breach your environment. Plus, these advanced threats aren't limited to the outside. Some breaches begin inside an organization. The bad actors can be stealing or destroying data and even damaging the systems themselves without anyone knowing, requiring sophisticated enterprise-grade monitoring solutions.

To adequately detect security risks, enterprise companies must understand what data they hold and where it resides. Mapping your data enables you to understand its importance, govern it according to applicable regulatory demands, and minimize the risk of non-compliance, theft, and more. For large enterprises with complex data ecosystems, this requires automated data discovery and classification tools that can scale with your organization.

It's also helpful for enterprise security teams to understand individual user/entity behavior. When you understand what "normal" is for a user or a machine in the system, it's easier to identify behaviors that don't meet the patterns and might be putting the company at risk. User and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) provide enterprises with AI-powered insights to detect anomalous activities across thousands of users and endpoints.

One reason enterprise security teams struggle with detection is that many solutions generate so much data that they create "false positives." In fact, so much data is generated that it's often hard to determine what is an actual threat. Security operations centers just don't have the time to look at each alert individually and evaluate the risk. That's why any good enterprise strategy will have the ability to evaluate and automate responses, and then elevate higher-risk alerts to the security team for action. Security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) platforms are essential for large enterprises to manage the volume of security alerts effectively.

A third major component of cyber resilience and enterprise cybersecurity is the ability to adapt and evolve your security posture to stay ahead of threats. Hackers are constantly finding new ways to exploit vulnerabilities. They know that there will eventually be a fix for what worked yesterday, so they're constantly trying to figure out what will work tomorrow. A cyber-resilient enterprise organization will anticipate the new attack vectors through threat modeling and work to defend them even before they become a vulnerability.

To evolve requires the ability to quickly deploy and integrate existing and new services, both on-premises and in the cloud. It also requires access to industry intellectual property and best practices ideally built into the products and tools being used for security. And it involves being able to rapidly correlate data using mathematical models and machine learning so you can make data-driven decisions across your enterprise security environment.