We see more businesses take the online route to success. Even traditional brick-and-mortar firms are going online to enhance their outreach and improve their revenues. Companies are increasing their digital spending as they are continuously striving to stay ahead of their competition. Customers also find it easy to transact online or at least research the products they wish to purchase.
The threat of a data breach is immense, with even the best brands having faced a breach. Companies must protect their customer data and take the necessary steps to thwart any cyberattack. Studies show that global cybersecurity spending is expected to reach US$ 270 billion by 2026.
Find how to formulate a robust cybersecurity strategy to ensure the protection of incumbent data.
Getting started with the foundation
As a starting point, you must understand the digital assets of the business that must be protected. Next, you must know all IT assets you have and protect them from a data breach. It could be your servers, devices, or applications too. Also, try to understand the processes that will be affected in the event of a data breach.
The cybersecurity strategy will also depend on the risk appetite of the company. While creating the strategy, you must consider the types of attacks the business may face. The strategy must ensure that the business is optimally protected against external attacks. The framework must be such that it can prioritize legal requirements and consider the compliance frameworks in mind.
Understanding the Security Landscape
You must assess the threat landscape, too, and it would also cover the environment where your business operates. The threat perception must include the quantum and the type of data stored by your company. Do some research and find the types of cyberattacks that your business may face. You can also track your competitors and determine what steps they are taking and whether they had encountered any data breaches.
Try to assess the threats that have the maximum chance of affecting your business. Understanding these threats is critical as it can help you provide the steps you can take to prevent these attacks. Your team must be aware of the perceivable threats and gather as much knowledge as they can to stop them.
Check the Maturity Level of your Processes
When you are up against an unknown enemy, you must have a clear understanding of your capability and your strengths too. So, create a list of categories and subcategories and assess the strengths of the business in them. It will help you to know the areas where you must allocate additional resources.
Based on your assessment of the current state of the incumbent processes, set a goal about where you wish the cybersecurity program to be within the next five years. Next, you must build your strategies based on where you want to see the company in your chosen categories. Also, consider the biggest threats that you perceive and create the strategy accordingly.
Building the Ideal Strategy for your Organization
The cybersecurity strategy that you formulate must be created on a robust framework that considers the business’s future environment and threat factors. Ensure that you are protecting the assets adequately and considering the enhancement of threats in the future. Create targets that can be met to improve the organization’s cybersecurity procedures that can help mitigate the threats.
You must assess the technologies and the software you are using and the need to upgrade them. Based on the metrics selected, you may need to move to other advanced technologies in the future. It will depend on the security maturity in the organization and how your IT security team can respond to the ever-increasing threats to the business.
Installing an SSL certificate
One of the critical aspects of your cybersecurity strategy is to secure your website. First, you need to buy cheap SSL certificate from trusted SSL providers like CheapSSLShop.com. This certificate encrypts the communication between your web server and the visitor’s browser. It will ensure that the desired recipient can read the messages and cannot be tampered with by any hacker.
Moving to the HTTPS platform will also help to enthuse trust in the visitors’ minds to authenticate the website being visited. The padlock on the address bar eases the fears from the minds of the visitors, and you can have more visitors to your website. It can also help to improve your SEO and remove the security warnings from the browser. Many different brands certificates like Comodo SSL certificate, RapidSSL certificate, GeoTrust, GlobalSign, DigiCert and more available in market. You can choose any cert as per your site requirement.
Documenting the Strategies to be Implemented
Once you finalize the strategy, you must ensure that it is adequately documented. It will act as the standard operating procedure for the business in tackling cyber threats. The document must cover all the control plans and policies that you wish to implement across the organization. Also include the responsibilities that are associated with various stakeholders in the organization.
You may try to receive feedback from the team while you are creating the document. Also, evaluate whether your organization will be able to address the plans in the current scenario. Else, it would be best if you created a milestone-based plan. You must also include the additional effort you need to propagate your cybersecurity strategy to all departments across all your locations.
Request Expert Help
You can also take additional expert help from outside. A team of ethical hackers can help you assess the vulnerabilities in your systems and networks and suggest various ways to plug them. Penetration testing can help you prepare a robust security framework that will always keep your business ahead of hackers.
The external consultants can help your internal by handholding them through the initial stages and train with the latest cybersecurity practices. External help is ideal for small companies, but you must undertake proper due diligence before enlisting their services. You can request their assistance in updating the cybersecurity strategy too.
Train Your Employees
You must train your employees in the cybersecurity policies that your company undertakes. You must ensure that the employees are aware of the cybersecurity strategy and adhere to them. It will also help them be mindful of how hackers can lure them into activities to access your networks.
Inform your employees about the global best practices for creating passwords. Also, inform them not to access your networks through public wi-fi systems that are insecure. It would help if you also had strict access restriction mechanisms for critical data. Only employees with requisite authority should have access to such data.
Conclusion
The threat to your data has been increasing over time:
- You must have robust processes to help your IT security team prevent any data breaches. These processes must be formulated keeping the overall threat in mind.
- Your team must identify threats and respond to them proactively.
- You must develop a robust security policy, and we have discussed how you can achieve this in this article.
