The threat of cyber attacks is continually growing larger. At this stage, if your organisation has managed to stay free from online attacks, it either takes its security very seriously, or has had a string of good luck. If your organisation falls into the second category, it may want to consider switching over to the first before it’s too late.
Cyber attacks can be incredibly costly, whether they are ransomware attacks that lock up your business’ mission critical data and grind everything to a halt, or data breaches that expose swathes of your client information.
These attacks can cause immense damages, and have even ruined businesses. The best way to avoid them is to come up with and follow a cybersecurity plan that provides the appropriate defences for your organisation. It can be a complex process, but we’ve compiled a rough outline to help you.
Analyse Your Organisation’s Current Situation
The first step is to take stock of where your organisation currently stands. This includes assessing its key assets, such as its sensitive and valuable data, as well as any core systems that may be targeted.
Your organisation also needs to analyse what threats it realistically faces. If it’s a government or military contractor, it may face sophisticated attacks from groups linked to nation states. If it has a whole lot of valuable data, it may face threats from criminal gangs. Even if it doesn’t hold on to much sensitive information, it could still fall victim to bored hackers, or even disgruntled customers or former employees.
Once your company has looked at these aspects, it also needs to take a step back and look at its current security systems and policies. Are the appropriate technical measures in place? Are they being managed effectively? Have employees received sufficient training? Is there a response plan in place if the organisation does suffer an attack?
Devising a Cybersecurity Plan
After taking stock of your organisation’s current situation, you should be in a much better position to determine its future security requirements, as well as what needs to change. All businesses have limited resources, and no organisation can do everything at once, so it’s important for the cybersecurity plan to prioritise the most critical steps and make sure that they are taken care of at the beginning.
The plan should address the highest risk areas first, as well as the aspects where risk can be significantly minimised with quick and easy fixes. Once it has taken care of these priorities, your organisation can move on to the less critical areas.
The plan should include new security measures, as well as the overall procedure and policy that is required to deploy them effectively. It also needs the appropriate monitoring systems in place, as well as flexibility to adapt over time, as new threats and technologies emerge.
How Do You Do All of This?
Cyber defence is challenging for most businesses, especially for small-to-medium sized companies.
Because cybersecurity is such a specialised and quickly moving field of study, most of these organisations simply lack the skills, knowledge and resources that they need to adequately defend themselves.
In most cases, it’s not practical to employ the necessary specialists directly, or to hand them the budgets they need to do their jobs effectively. This puts many organisations in a difficult position – they face tremendous threats, but also find it difficult to defend themselves.
Thankfully, there is another solution – they can engage a security specialist who can manage their defences for them. Because Gridware focuses on security, we have all of the skills and resources on hand to minimise your organisation’s risks.
Due to economies of scale, our security services also work out much cheaper – your organisation doesn’t need to have the wide range of information security skills and the necessary tools in-house, because we have them on hand instead. Contact our representatives to see how we can customise our security offerings to give your business the defences it needs.
