Three Considerations to Remember When Improving Cybersecurity

Businesses should stay ahead of new cyber threats and keep up with the latest technologies to ensure protection. This is why it is crucial to keep an eye on what is going on in the world of cybersecurity, particularly as so many organizations rely heavily on technology and software, which is why researching ahead of outsourcing and partnering is vital.

A company’s sensitive data can attract cybercriminals for various reasons, including espionage and financial gain. There are harsh consequences of such attacks, with damaged reputations and loss of profits being possibilities. To prevent these possibilities from becoming reality, you should work to improve your business’ cybersecurity practices.

Fortunately, this post lists three of the main considerations to remember when working to improve cybersecurity.

Implement Technical Controls

Access controls, such as multi-factor authentication, antivirus software, and firewalls, are all examples of technical controls that are vital to improving business cybersecurity. They do much more than protect the company’s financial health and reputation from cyber threats, including maintaining business continuity and safeguarding sensitive data. Such automated and technology-driven measures can create a robust defense against attacks.

The first step in implementing technical controls is to perform a risk assessment. This type of assessment should be used to identify vulnerabilities and valuable assets. With a better idea of what to protect, you can then focus on applying controls that protect your highest-priority assets and address the most significant risks.

You must focus on preventative controls during this implementation. These proactive measures are designed to halt cyberattacks before they can succeed in harming your business. For example, policies for password complexity should be enforced within the company, and a business-wide password manager might be used to help employees comply with this. 

Technical controls do require continuous work, though. These controls will require regular maintenance and monitoring as well to ensure continued protection. The team in charge of cybersecurity should conduct regular security audits to identify weaknesses and test the effectiveness of your controls.

Develop Strong Security Practices

Robust security measures are necessary to safeguard critical business information and help the company stay ahead of evolving cyber threats, so you must develop strong security practices. This can extend from utilizing data encryption and conducting regular software updates to training employees on recognizing phishing and social engineering scams. Your business will be much more prepared to protect against data theft and maintain customer trust.

Safeguards should be implemented to protect the business’ critical assets and minimize the overall attack surface. This means ensuring that employees have access only to the data and systems required for their specific role, and that access is removed when they leave the company. All user accounts should have at least two forms of verification for access, which will lower the risk of unauthorized access.

You must also keep this in mind when outsourcing or partnering with another service. After all, a reputable service will work hard to protect your business and reduce the risks, while others might not display this case. An example of a useful resource is the Consensus Assessments Initiative Questionnaire (CAIQ), which assesses cloud service providers’ security – learn more about CAIQ here.

Also, as previously mentioned, staff members should be empowered with knowledge about cybersecurity. This type of information can create a “human firewall,” especially since human error is a primary cause of security incidents. Regular training on topics, such as safe internet usage, should be provided, and simulations could be used to test employees’ vigilance.

Create and Test Disaster Recovery Plans

With cybersecurity risks constantly evolving, regular testing is essential to identify and resolve weaknesses, as well as verify recovery processes. A disaster recovery plan will include this, outlining detailed steps that your business should take to respond to cyberattacks. Developing this type of plan is only one step, though, as it will require testing, too.

Using the risk assessment completed earlier, you can prioritize critical assets and define the recovery objectives. This will include the recovery time objectives (RTOs), which are the maximum amount of downtime a business can tolerate for each critical system, and the maximum acceptable amount of data loss, defined by how often backups must be performed, also known as recovery point objectives (RPOs).

You can then develop backup and recovery strategies. It is important to use the 3-2-1 rule by creating three copies of your data, storing them on two different types of media, and keeping one copy offsite. This will protect the company against device failure, local disasters, and regional outages.

If you want to learn how to test the strength of your disaster recovery plan, click here.

To conclude, improving cybersecurity for your business is not a one-off task. This will require regular changes and tests to ensure your company is sufficiently protected from online attacks. Thankfully, you can use the three considerations mentioned here to make improvements.