Your organization is only as safe as your strongest measures. If you have yet to implement the best practices of cybersecurity for your business, you’re likely to be at risk for a number of different attacks, including malware, phishing, and even attacks from the inside. With this being the case, your most valuable assets are in danger of being compromised or stolen — so it’s important to get the jump on integrating good security practices within your business now. But what do good security practices look like?
Recognize What Tools You Need
The first thing that every organization needs to acknowledge is that they require help. Whether it’s a vulnerability to unsafe emails or a lack of password management, there’s always a tool that’s meant to solve the problem in question. So, before you do anything, you will need to prepare your company by listing the issues you have and develop a plan to implement tools that address those problems. For example, if you own a business where your employees have multiple email accounts and you want to increase focus and productivity by eliminating email overload and spam, you can consider a unified email app like Edison Mail. If your business uses various software with logins that need to be handled by multiple users, you might want to invest in an open-source enterprise password management tool that can easily meet your needs. If you’ve experienced issues with malicious URLs in the past, a URL filter would be another tool you’ll want to keep handy. As with any endeavor, your security practices should start with a checklist of the necessities.
Ready Your Team For Their Roles
Rather than just implementing tools, proper security requires people who understand what they’re supposed to do within the work environment. Training people on user-controlled best practices is essential to keep your team safe from cyberattacks, and to creating a culture in the workplace that emphasizes the safety of the company’s assets as well as each teammate’s personal security. What’s more, you should be able to manage and enforce the expectations of what each role has authority to do in a security-first setting. With each user type handled with specific access controls, you can ensure teammates will never overstep their bounds by accident — or on purpose. As with other important measures, your management of access controls and training on security protocol should be a regular occurrence, so that your company’s security within and outside the team is always up-to-date.
Have A Backup Of Everything
Things happen, be it the result of a cyber attack or a technical difficulty, and it’s your job to be prepared. That’s why it’s crucial to have backups. Backing up your workload regularly (read, at least daily) equates to a measure of insurance against the worst that can happen. If your assets are backed up, you can recover them more quickly in the wake of compromise; if they’re not, you’ll spend a lot more time pivoting, finding solutions to the sometimes immeasurable loss of work. This kind of measure makes sure that the majority of your time is never spent fixing or salvaging the company’s assets — but instead is used to serve customers and continue business as usual as soon as possible.
Watch Diligently For Suspicious Activity
You have to get used to watching things closely. As an organization, your team’s activities, communications, and assets require monitoring in order to maintain the highest level of security. Poring through the activity of your team can get tiresome, though, so if you’re able, you should delegate with a tool that keeps an eye out for suspicious behavior. Such detection tools and dashboards can help you review overall security metrics, rather than having to monitor each endpoint and cloud service piece by piece. Unifying this data into a single pane of glass makes it easier to make sense of, and easier to act upon. It can even mean the difference between spotting a cyber attacker before or after the damage is done to your internal assets. It’s tools like this and the general watchfulness that helps to prevent insider attacks, with cases of compromising teammates taking action against your organization. When using a detection tool, the first signs of problematic behavior can be flagged early enough for you to defend your company against it.
Get Familiar With Automation
You’re just one person — or, in many cases, your organization might consist of more than just you. However, you have a job already, as do your teammates. It’s hard on a team to have to shoulder more responsibilities, such as in-depth threat monitoring and the like, which could be done by another entity altogether. That’s the beauty of automation. Like with other automated processes, automated security measures make for a better assurance of avoiding mistakes. From automated flagging of issues, which allow for quicker response times, to the ability for various tools to share consistent security measures, automation is a central tenet of cybersecurity today. Managing changes in roles, monitoring for threat detection, and other such benefits are activities that can now be easily managed by a tool that is designed for the automation of a company’s security measures. Never waste your time doing more than you should, and never underestimate the ability of a machine to avoid simple human errors. Automation can set you up for success in each facet of your security protocol.
Conclusion
To show that you value your company, you’ll have to integrate strong security practices and make an effort to avoid the dangers of cyber-attacks and the like. It’s not a question of whether you do it — it’s a question of whether you’ll do it now. If you plan to protect yourself, get a head start with the methods above.
