6 Ways to Improve Your Cybersecurity

How businesses can improve their security

Cybercrimes are on the rise and businesses more than ever are being targeted by hackers.

The lack of cybersecurity measures by most businesses, coupled with hackers using readily available malware makes it easy for cybercriminals to penetrate networks and systems to carry out attacks. As a result, businesses must have a solid cybersecurity posture that allows them to effectively identify and handle attacks across systems.

There are numerous practices that you can follow to assist detect vulnerabilities in security protocols as well as assess risk while trying to improve your company’s cybersecurity. Implementing these guiding principles will not only help your security strategy, but it can also be continuously reviewed and improved in the future.

Here are six excellent strategies for improving your organisation's overall security.

1. Review and assess your cybersecurity risk

Analysing the measures you already have is the first important factor in enhancing your cybersecurity. Performing a cybersecurity risk analysis is one method to achieve this. This evaluation determines the amount of vulnerability in your organization's various assets. The assessment's findings will help you in determining which actions must be taken to improve your overall security as well as the safety measures you implement to guard against future threats.

When performing risk evaluations, it is indeed crucial to analyse your company's third-party vendors so that any weaknesses in their networks may be identified and addressed too. This is because a vulnerability anywhere within your supply chain may increase risk and lose your company money and reputation. Therefore, it's a good idea to audit high-risk providers on a regular basis.

2. Ranking and prioritsing your risks

It's critical to evaluate asset vulnerabilities based on the total risk they provide to your business once they've been found. This will help you organize your efforts to enhance your overall security and influence the risk benchmarks you establish for future assessments.

By providing a letter grade to your cybersecurity depending on how well it protects relevant data and information, these security ratings will assist you in prioritising risk. The letter grade awarded gives your company a clear picture of which aspects of your security infrastructure needs attention.

3. Security metrics

Security metrics enable your company to correctly assess the efficacy of your security procedures. These indicators may also be used to identify risk mitigation strategies and to influence risk prioritisation in the future.

You must verify that your security metrics are aligned with your security requirements while not being excessively complicated in order for them to offer value. These metrics are useful to identify and monitor your key performance indicators (KPIs), so make sure that the information they're looking at is accurate and simple to comprehend.

The usefulness of a metric depends on how mature your organization's security systems are. As a result, it's critical that you define scalable objectives for each metric you measure so that you can keep track of how your security posture evolves.

4. Cybersecurity automation process

When trying to minimise risk or enhance security procedures, including automation into your company’s network systems is vital. Using automated cybersecurity programs to manage your network frees up time for IT staff, thus allowing security experts to concentrate on more important tasks such as potential high risks dangers.

Furthermore, automated cybersecurity solutions can aid in the reduction of incident reaction times and the prevention of threats propagating across networks. Automated resources may also be utilised to analyse security metrics if they are set up appropriately. Therefore, it is recommended that you keep track of metrics that enable automatic data gathering.

5. Train your staff

One way to reduce security risks is to provide training on a range of cybersecurity risks to all your staff. It's critical to make staff training a priority as a method of protecting your company from external cyberattacks. During the recruitment process, every individual should undergo training courses, with the curriculum varied depending on job function as well as rank. You may assess the efficacy of your cybersecurity education initiatives by assessing staff cybersecurity literacy on a regular basis.

6. Response Plan

You should have a response strategy in place in the case of a breach since this may assist in limiting possible harm and allow for a rapid return to regular operations. Establishing reaction teams who are accountable for leading your organization's activities if your networks get hacked is a smart place to start.

To guarantee that no time is lost during an attack, develop a list of actions that should be prioritised. Based on the level of the attack as well as the business size, this strategy will change.

Perform a simulated hack once the strategy has been created to confirm that each individual knows their job and can carry it out properly. At minimal, one time per year, or when advanced innovation is installed in your company, your reaction plans should be revised.

The continuous evolvement of the cyberthreats has made it extremely challenging for businesses to correctly assess the strength of their cybersecurity. Furthermore, emerging innovations might make it difficult for security teams to discover attack vectors.

How Securiwiser can help you

Considering this, Securiwiser cybersecurity ranking system is a tool designed to help businesses to analyse their cyber risks. Securiwiser will provide your security team with data and analytics of your company's cybersecurity posture, enabling you to take action and minimise risks. Sign up for a free account and report today.