By Indiana Lee
Creating a robust cybersecurity plan keeps your business safe from digital threats. This article covers common threats, how to perform a business impact analysis, and then develop a plan based on the results. Learn how to train your staff on new policies and keep their systems safe.
Businesses cannot afford to stay in business today without robust cybersecurity measures. As corporate resources become increasingly digitized with tools like artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and online payment portals, hackers can exploit any vulnerabilities and disrupt your operations. That can harm your company or even put it out of business.
Fortunately, building a robust cybersecurity plan can minimize those threats. Assessing these risks helps you design and implement a plan to address those dangers. In addition, you must thoroughly research the impact a disruption can have on your firm and create solutions to recover business functions as quickly as possible. Finally, you’ll need to train your staff on procedures that keep them and your client’s data safe and secure.
The first step is to discover the potential risks inherent in your current systems or operations.
Identifying Cybersecurity Risks
There are two categories for assessing cybersecurity risks: understanding common threats all companies face and assessing the risks that are particular to your company, such as investment details, customer data, or compliance.
The common threats that all companies face can be solved with tried and true business solutions. The top risks and cybersecurity solutions every business should consider include:
1. Hacking
All devices in your organization are vulnerable to hackers. Endpoint security can protect all your devices from hackers, including phones, computers, and tablets. These systems monitor for threats, notify administrators, and use AI to thwart attacks.
2. System Breaches
All systems can experience security breaches. Incident response services eliminate problems inside software and other systems. They help identify hazards, isolate systems, and mitigate issues like malware.
3. Connectivity Vulnerabilities
Online connectivity has risks, too. Firewalls block external attacks on your internal systems. Specialized security services protect data that you store on the Cloud.
4. Data Theft and Corruption
Data is always at risk of theft and corruption. Data protection services must be able to protect both structured and unstructured data. They must act quickly to correct or prevent harm to vulnerable data like customer information, confidential documents, and internal communication.
Once you understand these baseline vulnerabilities and consider potential solutions, it’s time to go deeper and discover what risks and threats are unique to your company by implementing a business impact analysis.
Performing a Business Impact Analysis
Before implementing a cybersecurity plan, perform a business impact analysis (BIA). This process will help you to understand variables and dependencies unique to your organization. This type of analysis reviews your company’s operations, looking for vulnerabilities. It also helps you to understand how disruption would impact it, allowing you to set priorities and allot resources to address disaster and put continuity and recovery plans in place. You should revisit and review your BIA periodically, especially before making sweeping business changes.
Focus your BIA’s goals on cybersecurity and the departments impacted the most by these threats to prioritize objectives. This goes beyond your IT department and to other critical operations, such as data management or finance. Next, identify essential business functions, including activities and services, as well as dependencies throughout your firm. Spend time talking to department heads to understand the risks they face and the solutions they require.
In putting together a BIA, you’ll need to review how cybersecurity disruption could impact your company and prioritize the potential risks, including setting up time frames to recover damages incurred by your organization. Document all these variables.
Once you have assessed your organization and systems for vulnerabilities and prioritized solutions, set deadlines for each objective. Don’t forget to address budgetary requirements, too. Next, you’ll finalize your plan and put it in place.
Finalizing and Implementing Your Cybersecurity Plan
The next step in your cybersecurity plan is determining if your current systems are up to the challenge. If not, you may need to work on a budget for upgrades or new systems.
What sort of tools should your cybersecurity systems employ? You can protect against risk with cybersecurity awareness. Organizations with the highest risks, like financial institutions, employ high-level systems with security cameras and recording devices to safeguard their assets and data. All companies can take a lesson from the four key cybersecurity measures they employ:
1. Device Hardening Protocols
Any cybersecurity plan is only as good as the security of the passwords that protect it. It’s crucial to set complex passwords that are difficult to crack and ensure that only the required users have them. Some systems even provide network hardening guides, which help your team set up devices and systems that are difficult to breach.
2. End-To-End Encryption
Sometimes, data is in motion, generally through transmission, such as a wire transfer. Another example is when a camera sends images to a receiver. End-to-end encryption is a way to protect data, whether it is moving or static. Often, this involves the use of additional passwords and account information.
3. Patch Management
Be sure your systems are up-to-date with all the latest security updates and firmware patches. If a system is out-of-date, a company may discontinue support. Hopefully, your IT department will receive upgrade notices from service providers and plans accordingly. Global cyberthreats are also a potential vulnerability so be sure your team understands these challenges.
4. Trusted Supply Chain
When installing new systems, it’s wise to use vendors that manufacture all aspects of a system, like banks do for security systems. This ensures that the system works seamlessly. Choose reliable vendors who have a proven track record of success.
Implementing a plan of this caliber is crucial, but equally important is crafting policies and procedures that keep your company, employees, and clients safe. That means getting your entire staff on board and educating them about the new measures you have built into your cybersecurity plan.
Educating Your Staff About Security Challenges
Whether you are onboarding a new employee, changing current employees to a new system, or integrating new security measures, instructing your staff is a key component of hardening your system against attacks. A great starting point is training your teams on the do’s and don’ts of cybersecurity.
As mentioned, strong passwords are critical. When employees get to pick their own, they must select ones that are difficult to crack. Instruct staff members to create ones that contain upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols, and are fairly long. Consider installing a password manager to keep everyone’s password safe. It can also help employees avoid writing those passwords and keeping them near their computers.
Every company should also have a policy about clicking on links and attachments because this is a common way that spyware and ransomware can get in and corrupt or steal your data. Show your staff examples of how these emails can look similar to legitimate emails from known corporations. Have your staff preview links by hovering over them to see if they look legitimate. You should also instruct them to avoid unsolicited and unexpected emails or to check with the sender to confirm first.
Training should cover any policies you created about data usage and connectivity in and out of the office. For example, using public Wi-Fi puts data at risk. You may configure company laptops not to connect to unauthorized systems. However, you should still train your staff on safety measures for remote connectivity.
Building a robust cybersecurity plan is essential to maintain the operation of your business after an attack or other disruption. Investing the time to understand common threats and the unique vulnerabilities of your organization will help you develop a plan and train your staff. This endeavor will help safeguard your company and keep your business running smoothly, no matter the crisis.
About the Author
Indiana Lee is a writer, reader, and jigsaw puzzle enthusiast from the Pacific Northwest. An expert on business operations, leadership, marketing, and lifestyle.
