Cybersecurity is a difficult part of risk management for most businesses, in part because it evolves so quickly and in part because it is quite misunderstood. There are a few key tactics to unlocking the most cost-effective approach to security for your company, though. Using these four key paths to better practices together will do a lot to improve your risk exposure and your response to your biggest threats.
1. Invest in a Ransomware Prevention Kit
Whether it’s a literal software suite for your security professionals or a service that safeguards your infrastructure against ransomware attacks, investing in a way to prevent those lockouts and data thefts might be the most important part of building a reasonable security plan in 2023. Ransomware attacks have been responsible for a growing number of security breaches involving millions of people’s financial and health care information in recent years, but if you can sidestep the lockout from your own information, you can get back to work while your security team works with the authorities to fight back.
2. Learn To Prioritize and Address Cybersecurity Threats
There is a decades-old model of network security that approaches every vulnerability as a potential point of attack. When systems were simpler and the number of possible attackers was fewer, this may have made sense.
In today’s security environment, though, your team needs to be able to prioritize the vulnerabilities that are most likely to be chosen as avenues of attack. They can then prioritize patches and other security solutions in ways that lead to the greatest risk reduction in the least amount of time. The best part about vulnerability mitigation? It still maintains your awareness of those lower-priority threats. That means if there is a breach, you’ve got a list of avenues of attack to assess at hand. You can respond faster even when something does slip through your defenses.
3. Understand New Challenges Posed by the Cloud
Companies that adopted cloud infrastructure early learned that the cybersecurity approaches designed to protect mainframe-powered intranets are not the same ones you need to use to protect your data when it’s being hosted by a third party. You need ways to assess the service provider’s security and to work with them if issues arise, as well as best practices for your own data management to avoid breaches that come from your hardware or employee behavior.
All of your other tactics need to be informed by this new reality if you move your core productivity apps and data archival to cloud services, including any approach to triaging threats or to ransomware prevention.
4. Work With Evolving Best Practices in Public and Private-Sector Cybersecurity
The March 2023 cybersecurity plan outlined by the Biden administration addresses the importance of evolving the nation’s understanding of infrastructure threats and security to involve both public and private actors. As such, there are some evolving guidelines built in collaboration between the administration and private security specialists.
As these recommendations grow and evolve, working within them will be vital to maintaining compatibility with secure systems from other parties, because it is this kind of move that tends to define standards. Since it’s cyber security, those standards will always be evolving, too. Using the best practices outlined can make everything from prevention to vulnerability detection just a little bit easier, though.
Is It Time To Overhaul Your Approach?
If you have made the move to cloud infrastructure but you have not reshaped your security plan to reflect this, it’s time to make the move. There’s no reason to panic if there’s been no issue so far, but a swift realignment with the current best practices for dealing with today’s threats will be essential, and it’s a high priority. After that, it will be time to set up a sustainably self-revising approach to security, and that might mean hiring specialists to handle your threat assessment. Whether that means staff or contracted services, that’s entirely up to you.
