How to improve your business’s security maturity

Keeping your business safe from cyber-attacks is critical for success in the digital age. Without a secure infrastructure, your business can be vulnerable to data breaches, financial losses, and reputational damage. The effects a security incident will have on your business were clearly seen nationwide during the recent Optus attack.

Improving your business’s security maturity is the key to protecting your assets and keeping your customers safe. With the right security protocols in place, you can ensure your business continuity.

What is security maturity?

As the digital world continues to expand, so does the number of threats organisations face. These threats can include data breaches, phishing, and other fraudulent activities, and they can come from a broad range of sources.

To protect your organisation and its data, you need to assess your current level of security maturity. In order to do this, you need to understand the key issues that contribute to cyber security risk.

Business security maturity at a high level can be described as how to protect your business’s data and brand while executing operational processes. Depending on which maturity level a company has chosen, they will be more or less prepared for a cyber security incident.

Evaluate your cyber risk

Before you can determine what your security needs are, you need to first assess your level of risk. You can do this by looking at the following factors:

• How critical is your data?
  • Are you storing proprietary or highly sensitive data?
• What is the threat landscape like?
  • Are there any significant threats in the area your business operates in?
  • What types of attacks do you face?
• How capable is your security solution?
  • Does it offer the appropriate level of protection?
• How well-trained are your employees?
  • Do they know how to respond to an incident?
• What level of visibility do you have into the operations of your business?

Protect your network end-to-end

Once you’ve identified the risks to your business, you need to protect the network end-to-end. This includes everything from securing your network, to securing user devices, to securing your organisation’s data.

To secure your network, employ a strong authentication strategy so that only authorised users can access your network, and ensure that your network is segmented end-to-end. This allows you to segment traffic according to type, and you can use security policies to inspect traffic and enforce access controls and usage limitations.

Implement intrusion detection

Once you’ve secured your network, you need to begin protecting your data. To do so, you’ll want to use a threat detection solution. This can help you proactively identify and respond to threats that are attempting to access your network.

A threat detection solution can help you by:

• Collecting and storing data from your devices and network.
• Detecting and blocking threats that are attempting to breach your network.
• Automating the response process.

Secure email gateway

Email remains one of the most popular ways to transmit sensitive data, and intruders are always looking for ways to steal your data. To prevent email breaches, encrypt data in transit and at rest with a quality email gateway. The gateway works analyses the content of each email, and only allows those deemed safe to pass through. It also uses encryption to ensure that emails are secure and private.

Encrypting your email traffic will protect it from prying eyes and malicious actors by ensuring that only those with the correct decryption key can view the information. This way, you can be sure that your data is safe from theft or misuse.

Train your employees to recognise threats

Employees one of the most critical component of cyber security. Training on how to identify threats, respond to incidents, and keep critical data secure will have a long-term impact on the effectiveness of your organisation’s cyber security maturity.

A good cyber security training program should include:

Legal and regulatory training: a balanced approach to cyber security and GDPR compliance. You will want to ensure your employees understand how to report data breaches and comply with regulations when doing so.

Digital hygiene training: helps your employees identify, report, and avoid unsafe online behaviours, such as sending sensitive data, sharing passwords, and downloading files from unknown sources.

Cyber security: introduce your employees to the basics of cyber security, such as threats, risk management, and how to spot suspicious activity, like phishing emails.

Design and implement an incident response plan

An incident response plan can help you respond to unexpected events like natural disasters, data breaches, and other cyber threats. This includes preparing a plan that will inform you how to respond to incidents, like phishing scams.

While creating your incident response plan, you’ll want to consider the following:

• Who will be involved in responding to incidents?
• Where will you communicate incidents?
• How will you track incidents?
• Ensuring the incident doesn’t happen again.

Improve your business’s security maturity with expert help

Cyber security is a crucial issue for all businesses. As the perceived and real risks of cyber threats increase, so too does the need for all organisations to improve their cyber security measures.

The cyber security specialists at Essential Tech can audit your security maturity, advise you on software and tools, and fully manage your security environment for maximum protection.