In today’s digital era, cyber threats are ever-present and remain a growing concern for businesses and organizations, whether small ones or large corporations, especially those that have embarked or are starting to embrace digital transformation.
Amidst the heightened IT demands prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, cyber risks likewise continue to grow, with remote work setups becoming the new norm in the work environment. A Statista research revealed that in June 2021, there were over 98,000 cyber attacks reported in the Philippines and that the number of cyberattacks in the country mounted, totaling around 1.76 million during the first quarter of the year. Kaspersky also reported that almost five million attacks against desktops at home in the Philippines were recorded from January to June in 2021. Hence, creating and implementing a strong cyber security strategy is now more critical than ever.
This is why business and IT leaders are now compelled to bring cybersecurity to the forefront of their operations, especially as the penetration of threats into business systems can bring damaging ripple effects to the bottomline of a company. Having exposure to cyber threats, a company is not only at risk of losing its data, but also their customers’, likewise endangering a company’s credibility, sales, and profits.
Here are five factors to consider to get you on the right path in order to keep your business safe and secure and to pave the road to cyber-resiliency.
1. Employee training
Data security needs to be regarded as everyone’s responsibility in an organization. With that in mind, providing employees with adequate and effective training on the fundamentals and beyond-the-basics of protecting information is an important step. Cybersecurity training programs will reduce the risk of data breaches and will better equip employees to recognize potential risks, and prevent costly mistakes at present and in the long run. Given the new surge of threats brought by the pandemic, creating a culture of safety though defense measures such as cybersecurity training programs must be ramped up to fend off any forms of attack on company and customer data.
2. Governance
Another pillar of a sound cybersecurity strategy is governance, which describes the policies and processes that determine how a company or organization will detect, prevent and respond to cyber crimes or incidents, and how resources, business drivers, data, and organizational dynamics will be taken into account. In developing your cybersecurity strategy, the involvement of the board or senior management also plays a critical role in managing and evaluating the organization’s overall risk profile, its portfolio of initiatives, and the level of oversight warranted. Communication is an important component in this regard, so operational leaders must be able to articulate what the contributing value of cybersecurity is and why it must be considered a permanent capital expenditure, as well as the best practices, in a manner that they can comprehend and internalize..
3. A risk-based approach
Developing your cybersecurity strategy and compliance from a risk-based perspective is important for proactive problem identification and resolution. A risk-based approach is a systematic method that identifies, evaluates, prioritizes threats facing the organization and is tailored to specific organizational needs. This approach includes business impact analysis; risk assessment; implementation of needed controls, testing, validation, and reporting; and continuous monitoring and governance.
4. Disaster recovery plan
One of the critical questions you need to ask in effectively crafting and deploying your cybersecurity strategy is whether your organization has an established risk remediation plan. Despite your best efforts to build and maintain resilient controls against potential threats, attackers can still find ways to make breaches happen. Thus, your data security strategy will need to consider the next steps through a disaster recovery plan, a list of all the processes to maintain or rebuild IT systems, which needs to be in place to secure your network, prevent further damage, and safeguard the sustainability of your company’s initiatives.
5. Adaptive Security Focused Technology
The need to adopt the latest cybersecurity technologies has fortified the problems and challenges presented by the pandemic as attacks continue to develop to be highly sophisticated. Given the dynamic and evolving nature of cyber threats as well as the technical expertise of cybercrime doers, constantly identifying and adopting innovative cybersecurity technologies are becoming a pressing need to build stronger defenses around business cybersecurity. Business endpoints can be made secure by leveraging tools and technologies such as advanced threat intelligence and deep learning, hardware authentication, user-behavior analytics, data loss prevention, the cloud, among others.
By keeping in mind these five factors of cybersecurity, you can build a strong framework for ensuring a robust, forward-thinking information security strategy that gives you peace of mind and your business’ ability to focus on what’s most important for your business. White Cloak is a technology services company dedicated to driving client innovation, helping organizations of all sizes and industries transform their cybersecurity efforts and strictly meet the highest level of industry compliance and security standards used by the banks and the military.
At the heart of White Cloak’s processes are efficiency and scalability, ensuring the latest technologies are employed where needed. If your organization is looking to implement a cyber security strategy and mitigate cyber risk, our passionate and highly skilled teams are here to help!
