In this digital age, the demarcating line between ‘online’ and ‘offline’ is increasingly getting blurred. Ubiquitous networking has made possible many great things, but we are also seeing the drawback now: from anywhere on the globe, we can be found and attacked by malefactors. When it comes to your responsibilities as a security professional, four things stand out:
- Focus on the basics and make sure that cybersecurity fundamentals are firmly in place.
- Reconsider any tradeoffs you have effected between tighter security and greater ease-of-use to ensure that you have achieved the desired balance.
- Automate everything that can be reasonably automated because manual attempts to prevail against the present environment of threats are not feasible.
- Emphasize organization-wide cybersecurity awareness training. This is critical as people are the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain and good security relies on everyone’s best efforts.
Focus On Cybersecurity Fundamentals
In their defenses, even good security organizations have gaps. They may be wary of them and have plans to close them, but for some reason or another, these are not implemented.
Unsurprisingly, while their risk of falling victim to an assault may be as great or even greater than that of a larger company, many smaller businesses are included among the laggards, and they typically have less resources to mitigate the damage.
Re-Examine Tighter Protection Vs. Ease-Of-Use
Some businesses have delayed MFA implementation because some of their workers see it as an impediment. But security practitioners, considering today’s growing threats, may want to reconsider the tradeoffs between more robust security and employees’ ease-of-work. For example, businesses can adopt robust mobile device management (MDM) solution. Improved mobile device security is already important for just about every enterprise, and as the 5G roll out contributes to a much greater amount of work migrating to those devices, it will become even more significant.
Security teams may also want to roll out automated VPN enrollment to help safeguard key business applications. And they would want to accelerate their transition to the cloud, given the increasingly sophisticated security that cloud-based services offer.
Automate
No company has enough workers to manage all the security alerts or handle all the cyber security-related issues it faces. The only practical way of keeping ahead of this curve is to automate these tasks and look for ways to use machine learning.
A recent survey, however, reveals that almost half of all organizations either use no security automation or just minimal data collection and search scripting that is available. It is time to accept what is known as ‘medium’ automation if your organization is part of this community: automated processes that allow decision-making and use complicated logic to optimize workflow processes. If you’re already there, consider adding even more automation, such as systems that can function autonomously based on deep threat intelligence and analytics.
Impart Awareness Training On Cybersecurity
In several organizations, cybersecurity awareness training has been regarded as an annoyance. This is a self-defeating strategy that runs counter to the true, demonstrable advantages that such training can offer.
In order to minimize the company’s cyber risk, every employee needs to be aware of cybersecurity threats and the critical role they can play in helping to reduce them. Effective training also allows you to identify the groups of workers at greatest risk, allowing you to prioritize the protections at every stage of the business where they can do the most good.
Conclusion
Pervasive networking has resulted in numerous cyber threats for businesses and their employees. In order to resolve these, cybersecurity practitioners must completely enforce fundamental protection measures, such as across-the-board MFA, and should adopt rigid safety requirements, even at the expense of employee convenience.
