How To Create A Cyber Security Strategy For Your Business by Christy Lawrence
Business owners with companies that rely on digital technology in accomplishing tasks should develop a cyber security strategy. Are you in the process of creating one to keep your business information secure? If not, then it should be a priority.
Data threats now come in different sizes and shapes. If you want your company to be ready for whatever cyber attackers have up their sleeves, you need the right strategy.
Use this post as your guide when you’re about to create a strategic and effective cyber security plan for your business.
Make Sure You Understand Your Company’s Cyber Security Landscape
To understand your cyber security landscape, examine the types of cyber attacks that your business faces today. Insider threats, phishing, malware–which of these are currently affecting your business most severely and the most often? You could also check the types of threats that affected your competitors recently.
Another way to do this is through penetration testing (pen test). It’s ethical hacking where you’ll authorize a simulated cyber attack on your network or system to evaluate your weaknesses. A comprehensive article that talks about the things business owners need to look for when selecting a pen test vendor exists–view publisher site if you’re interested in this method.
Getting yourself up to speed with cyber threat trends that are predicted to affect your industry or organization is the next step. For example, many experts feel that the number of ransomware incidences is going to increase. Supply chain threats are also a growing concern among security researchers. A supply chain threat takes place when a company buys compromised components. Then, either it builds them into products to sell to consumers or uses them within its organization.
The key to developing an effective cyber security plan is to understand what threats your business will face and their likely severity.
List Your IT Assets To Know What Needs To Be Protected
It’s impossible to implement security measures without exactly knowing what needs to be protected. What you can do is catalog your IT assets by listing your devices, servers, storage repositories, and networks.
All of the essential pieces of data that your organization store should also be surveyed. These include those that are sensitive by nature, such as customer databases and credit card numbers, among other valuable information. By doing that, you’ll know where they’re saved, whether they’re on your business CRM, a cloud, or an email server.
Identify What Protection Methods Your Cyber Security Plan Should Contain
This part is your cyber security strategy’s nuts and bolts. A cloud monitoring application, VPN, backups, data encryption, anti-malware applications, firewalls are some of the protection methods you can list here.
How to know what security equipment, software, techniques, or technologies are suited to your organization? It’ll be based on your company’s cyber security landscape.
List Your Threat Detection Measures
Defending your assets is vital. That’s why you need protection and security software and technologies. However, a cyber security plan works better if you also have some offense against cyber criminals. Your offense could be in the form of a threat detection system.
To achieve that, consider incorporating external applications for advanced persistent threats, compromised credentials, brute-force hacks, denial of service attacks, and phishing attempts detection.
A comprehensive threat detection system should warn you of inconsistencies via automated alerts. That’s why it should include some form of network and asset monitoring.
Consider Bringing Expert Help
The team handling your business’ cyber security strategy should include expert professionals. That’s because the effectiveness of cyber security techniques depends on the knowledge of the individuals applying them.
Consider bringing expert help to your organization by putting out job postings for professionals who have vast cyber security experience. Ask your prospects for examples of their expertise in handling threats.
If you don’t have the budget to hire a cyber security expert, you always have the option to train your current team. Allow them access to resources, pieces of training, and masterclasses that talk about how to deal with ransomware and viruses. They should also learn how to avoid suspicious downloads, links, and emails.
Outsourcing your cyber security measures to cyber security services providers is another option that you could take. It’s a good idea, especially if you’re trying to save money but want to make sure that you can avoid wasting your resources on repairs that may result from entrusting your cyber security plan to inexperienced employees.
Assess Your Organization’s Cyber Security Maturity
If you decide to use your in-house team, you need to perform an honest assessment of the cyber security maturity of your company. Assess how mature your in-house team is in different categories and subcategories by using a cyber security framework.
Make sure to cover incident recovery capabilities, security technologies, governance, and policies. From cyber-physical systems to IoT, operational technology, and traditional IT, your assessment should cover all of your technologies.
Conclusion
Keep in mind that creating and implementing a cyber security plan is an ongoing process. Expect many challenges along the way, too. That’s why regularly evaluating your strategy is critically important. That way, you can address emerging hacking techniques and security threats that may affect your business.
About the Author:
Christy Lawrence is a cyber security advocate. She has a background in social engineering and information technology. She shares her expertise by creating web content such as blog writing Christy is a bachelorette who loves tech, nature, and sports. She has a cat named Chelsea.
The post How To Create A Cyber Security Strategy For Your Business by Christy Lawrence appeared first on Hakin9 – IT Security Magazine.
