With organizations linking more and more of their processes to their cyber infrastructure, it becomes imperative to put an effective cyber security strategy in place. With a robust cyber security process, a company can protect its assets, IP (intellectual property), staff, customers, and reputation in a more organized and efficient manner.
You can invest in sophisticated technical solutions, but that will not guarantee that your business has a foolproof plan against cyber attacks. If you wish to counter the evolving cyber threat to your organization, you must have an integrated approach towards cyber security tailored to your company’s specific requirements.
Your cyber security method must consider your risk profile which needs to address the people and other organizational elements on top of the technical aspects of its defense. A business can garner such expertise if its staff gets a certificate in cybersecurity from reliable and prestigious institutes.
Steps Towards a More Secure Business
A cyber security strategy lays out a plan for your organization to address the safety of its assets over three to five years and minimize cyber risks. The key areas to focus on while coming up with the strategy are:
- Step 1 – Determine what needs to be protected – You will be able to lay a strong foundation for a cyber security strategy by understanding the company’s assets you need to safeguard. Though a business can’t protect everything completely, you can emphasize what assets are most important and need to protect first. You can gauge this by reviewing how your organization generates revenue and some of the systems whose unavailability or breach of data security can disrupt revenue generation. These are some of the assets to be protected first. You can identify the other important assets by figuring out IT assets (such as devices, applications, servers, etc.) and data which are critical to your company.
- Step 2 – Understand the threat landscape – Once you know what you need to protect, the next step is to analyze the threat landscape. This is done by taking stock of the environment in which your business operates, which is governed by who your customers are, what you sell, who could benefit by disrupting your business, etc. As part of this step, you would also need to know your competitors and their threats since the threats your competitors face (or faced in the past) are quite similar to what you might face if proper security is not in place.
- Step 3 – Pick a framework for your strategic cyber security plan – The options for cyber security plan include ISO, CIS controls, and NIST. It is essential to select a framework for tracking your progress and prioritizing the important steps. You also need to decide on a timeline (based on the current state of security) to get to an acceptable level of risk.
- Step 4 – Evaluate how well your organization can execute the cyber security strategy – In the last step, you must figure out how your company is braced to accomplish the necessary security steps. Your current security and IT team would give you a peek into their bandwidth and skillsets. If you do not have the right resources, you might need to hire additional people to achieve security goals or get your staff trained on cyber security.
Conclusion
Cyber attacks pose severe threats to any organization. For any business, having a cyber security strategy is a must to protect its assets. Every business has its unique security needs; hence, learning cyber security processes would help immensely in coming up with the perfect security plan.
