This year, it’s estimated that security breaches will cost the world an estimated USD$11.4 million every minute. Moreover, IT managers, 20% of those, who fell victim to cyberattacks can’t identify how hackers managed to breach their security, while 17% have no information regarding the threat’s length of stay in the system before detection.
With numbers like these, perhaps it’s time to improve your security strategy from a reactive to a more proactive one. Having a security foundation is crucial to help you plan your course of action to upgrade your network security and prevent your business from being a victim of cybercrimes.
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Table of Contents
First Step In Improving Security
Before considering anything else, you have to test your system’s vulnerability first. You can do this by doing a security risk assessment. A team of security experts can do this for you properly. They can evaluate your security, do penetration testing, risk assessment, and vulnerability assessment. You can read the full info here.
After a thorough assessment of your security, you can then start to devise a strategy to beef up your security.
Ways To Improve Your Security Strategy
Below is a list of recommendations on the different ways you can improve your security strategy:
1. Network Segmentation
Although people might think that segmenting your network could make your system more vulnerable, it’s actually a good idea. A segmented network means fewer people are needed to manage each segment. Since hackers usually target workers instead of network security, there will be fewer vulnerability points.
Moreover, if one segment is breached, the breach would be easily contained since the hacker wouldn’t gain access to the whole system. Network segmentation can function as effective damage control. Besides, installation and testing would be much simpler.
2. Employee Awareness
Even the highest security level would mean nothing if your employees aren’t aware of the various ways they can be targeted. Data breaches often happen because of carelessness on the employees’ part. You can prevent this by having them undergo appropriate training.
This would mean you’d have to invest in their training, but with new types of attacks that hackers come up with regularly, any company would be courting disaster if employees aren’t trained. It’s also important to provide security training to your new hires as part of their orientation process.
Social engineering is getting sophisticated, so this should also be included in the security training. Any person would eventually make a mistake, but with security training, mistakes could be significantly minimized.
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3. Observe RBAC (Role-Based Access Control)
Giving your workers access to your entire system is putting your company’s security at risk. If one falls victim to a hacker, then the whole system is in jeopardy. Practice role-based access to reduce this risk.
Role-based access control (RBAC) is the practice of restricting access to company data to authorized personnel only. Put another way, an employee should be given access to data relevant to their role only.
For example, clients’ data should only be accessible to the customer support staff, or HR people to employees’ personal information. If one of the employees, for instance, falls prey to social engineering, they won’t be able to divulge too much information. Hence, your whole system won’t be compromised.
4. Employ Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
A platform usually asks users to provide just the username and password, but with MFA, it would ask for other identifying factors like the user’s PIN (personal identification number), facial recognition, one-time password, business key card, or fingerprint.
Even though usernames and passwords have their uses, they can be bypassed through brute force attacks or simple social engineering. Using added precautions, like MFA, means increased confidence in your network security.
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5. Use Privileged Access Management(PAM)
Privileged Access Management allows you to grant special access or abilities beyond the role of a standard user. It also consists of different cybersecurity strategies and technologies for accessing or managing the permissions of users or accounts. It allows organizations to secure their infrastructure or applications to run their business efficiently.
6. Consider Working With Security Specialists
An organization’s IT team can’t always deal with the whole network security. That’s why it’s important to consider working with security specialists to oversee your cybersecurity.
Your staff may not be able to monitor security 24/7, but there are security services that can. It’s sometimes more cost-effective to have somebody else be responsible for security so that your staff can focus on other things.
Security specialists can give organizations the choice and the flexibility to address issues about threats and changing regulatory requirements. They can monitor IT infrastructure as well as devices at service levels used for daily business operations while letting you have control of your policies and incident management.
7. Consider Using Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB)
CASB (cloud access security broker) is an application that deals with securing an organization’s data stored in the cloud. This is a big help to organizations that have concerns regarding cloud security.
With CASBs, organizations can manage and carry out security strategies across different applications. They can give valuable insights into cloud activities, as well as a way to simplify the management of multiple apps and services.
This application has functions that make it a proxy, filter, and firewall between cloud systems and the users. A CASB can detect unauthorized cloud apps or ‘shadow IT,’ including sensitive information that’s being accessed. It can also provide encryption for traffic to cloud providers.
Conclusion
Cyber attacks are becoming a major concern. So, it’s up to the companies to beef up their network security and come up with a robust security strategy. You have to do something first, though. It’s crucial to have your system undergo a security risk assessment to find out your vulnerabilities. The ways listed here could give you some ideas on where to start and what to include when planning to improve your security strategy.
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