New Year, New Cybersecurity Plan
Let us all welcome in the New Year with a new cybersecurity plan! Now is the perfect time for a business to thing about your formal cybersecurity strategy, not just your patching policy or updating your hardware and software, but the overall strategy. One of the mistakes organizations make is they try to manage their cybersecurity piecemeal. In doing so, things get misses, and your business becomes vulnerable to cyberattacks.
If your business already has a strategic cybersecurity plan, you do not necessarily have to recreate the wheel. Now is the time to just hone the plan to ensure you achieve success in this new year also. But for most of you out there that do not have a formal cybersecurity in place, keep reading.
The first thing you need to do to create a forma plan is to understand what cyber risks your business is willing to accept. Take into consideration the organization needs, as well as their IT needs. What level of risk is your leadership team willing to accept for operations? Leadership needs to set corporate security policies, such as policies around acceptable use of company-owned devices and BYOD. Consider who on staff needs extra security login protection such as multifactor authentication.
Now that you have that data, you can begin a broad sense of the plan. Now, determine how much downtime is acceptable? Are a few hours or an entire day acceptable? There are different performance demands for different applications, so you can not just look at the question of downtime at the entire business level. Once you understand the business risks, you then delve into the IT side.
You will need an inventory of the hardware and software for the business and do a risk assessment of each component. Design security controls and backup strategies to fight against vulnerabilities.
The strategic cybersecurity plan should include the corporate security policies set by your leadership team, identity and access control management for all users, data management, backup and disaster recovery plan, and a plan for security awareness training for all users. Your plan should also include an incident response plan that outlines what members of the team are on the Incident Response team, a contact list, and a response playbook to deal with the fallout from an incident occurring.
The last key step is having the cybersecurity strategic plan should be approved by leadership and stakeholder teams. Once you have an active plan, it should be reviewed and honed annually. I have made the steps of this plan seem easy for article length purpose, there is a lot of thinking and planning that goes into a cybersecurity plan, and we encourage your business to partner with someone like 2W Tech when going through this process.
No two organizations look the same and there can be caveats to a business that can easily get overlooked. Any slight oversight can open a business up to a cyberattack. To be sure you are best protecting your business from outside threats, give the team at 2W Tech a call today!
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