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Today's business transactions and operations involve technology resources that provide faster service delivery and more efficient results. Consequently, cyber threats are always on the horizon, with the potential for scams, data breaches, and extortion attacks happening to organizations. Following several best practices mentioned in this article will improve your organization's cybersecurity posture and ensure the identification of security gaps, and protect valuable assets.
Let us look at six best practices that your organization can implement.
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Conduct a cybersecurity risk assessment
Cybersecurity risk assessments involve identifying, analyzing, and evaluating weaknesses across your organization's assets and security controls that may pose risks to the business. They help map out the valuable information assets at risk for cyberattacks, their vulnerabilities, the likelihood of an attack happening, and the effects that attack could have on the organization.
Organizations should also extend cybersecurity risk assessments to third-party vendors and services. Doing so allows your organization to prepare and address any limitations they may have and not escalate the risk imposed on your business.
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Prioritize Risk
Completing the risk assessment allows organizations to organize and rank the identified risks based on the severity of their impact if a cyberattack is active to exploit the weaknesses. Prioritizing can be done through varied security ratings, ranging from letter grades or severity rankings.
Prioritizing the risks helps your organization formulate risk benchmarks that would be used in future evaluations and also allow internal teams to know where to put their focus.
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Track security metrics
Measuring how your organization performs against various implemented security practices allows you to understand what is effective and what is not in protecting your organization and its assets.
Consider tracking factors that affect the organization from both an operational and strategic point. Additionally, security teams must align the metrics with the organization's security goals and KPIs.
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Implement automated cybersecurity solutions
Automation is vital for mitigating risk and setting effective security practices and procedures. Automated solutions allow security teams to place their focus on high-risk threats while giving them back time that lower-ranked and benign activities would have consumed.
Automation also assists in cutting down incident response times, collecting security data, and performing metrics assessments.
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Educate employees
Security training for all employees reduces your organization's exposure to cyber threats and can be a means of detecting and protecting against cyber attacks. Ensure that an effective curriculum is in place to provide training based on common attacks and employee roles.
Periodically, evaluate employee performance and security literacy to evaluate the effectiveness of the training program.
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Create an incident response plan
Incident response plans provide a guideline to follow in the event of an attack. They help reduce the potential damage and allow for a quick turnaround time to normal business operations.
The following aspects are vital to any incident response plan:
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Establish response teams who will be responsible for the procedures to follow.
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Develop an action plan based on the prioritization of assets or risks.
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Conduct mock trials to train the employees on their roles and effective response.
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Update the response plan once per year or with every new technology added.
For more information on how to protect your business from cyberattacks, please contact Tabiri Analytics, Inc at https://tabirianalytics.com/contact/
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