How does your business recognize a security breach?

What is your organization’s protocol for dealing with such threats?

Does your organization regularly monitor security networks?

If you are unable to answer these questions, you seriously need to look into things deeper. 

Establishing an organization’s security is the foremost thing to do as it may lead to disastrous consequences for your business reputation. However, cybersecurity is often ignored as an unnecessary aspect, one should be well aware of why cybersecurity is important and how we can improve it. 

In such a technologically advanced world, it is impossible to stay protected without taking extra measures for improving security. Easily available malware has substantially minimized the barriers of security paving new ways of elevating cybercrimes. Because of this, businesses ought to have robust cybersecurity as this may help them to effectively stumble on and detect intrusions across networks. Whilst enhancing your company’s security posture, there are numerous maintenance steps that you can put into effect to become aware of gaps in security controls and hence quantify the danger associated. These practices will not only help in improving your corporation’s capability to protect important information, but will also ensure that your cybersecurity practices can be monitored and enhanced in future. 

Many agencies are nonetheless unprepared for detecting potential cyber-attacks in their organization, their valuable devices, cloud structures and IT infrastructures because of the flaws that users tend to make, and attackers can exploit them. Luckily, there are powerful and affordable ways to lessen an organization’s exposure with enhanced protection software that could improve their protection and capability of its personnel to dissuade attackers. Only safeguarding all security features such as IT infrastructures, hardware and software is not enough to combat attacks by hackers. Mentally preparing the team is the first step towards protecting an organization’s valuable assets. A number of other issues must be considered, such as educating your entire staff about the upcoming dangers of cyberattacks. Education campaigns must be run to create security-aware teammates who can be familiar with the regions of vulnerability that are of paramount importance to tighten the weakest links in cybersecurity. People of an organization are playing a more vital role nowadays as the first line of defense in keeping cybercriminals at bay. 

What is security posture?

In simple words, security posture is a tool for measuring cybersecurity practiced at a corporation and how your company is prepared for an attack. A sturdy security posture signifies that you’ve got the vital strategies under control to guard your business from vulnerabilities and threats. In today’s time sensitive information is continuously prone to being compromised, it is critically important to have a strong cybersecurity posture as a pinnacle of IT companies or any other company. Here are some tips and tricks to strengthen your business security networks to stay protected from cybercrimes. 

Steps for improving security posture

1. Security assessment

The amount of security posture is inversely proportional to the chances of your organization facing cyberattacks, i.e., with improved cybersecurity, risk of cyberattacks reduces. By assessing your enterprise’s security, you’re already a step closer to lessen risks of cyber threats. Finding out what’s wrong should be the first step in addressing your security posture, so that you can restore your security. Various tools are available nowadays to assess your firm’s cybersecurity posture. This helps you in determining the level of cyber threat and for performing essential steps in prioritizing tasks required to tighten your security. Based on priority you can take up the tasks you need to perform first. 

2. Implementing an Incident Management Plan

All businesses must have a plan in place for cyberattacks to reduce the burden and time consumption after a breach has already taken place. This will help the organization in quickly bouncing back to normal conditions as earliest as possible. An incident management plan is a vital part of improving a company’s security networks. This plan assists IT security teams in predicting a security breach before it can take place or when a breach is taking place. Pre-defining the sequence of actions to be carried out after a security breach occurs will assist in lessening the time and efforts it would take to formulate the steps in future. Likewise, pre-assigning roles to the teams for tackling such cybersecurity incidents will create an environment of higher communique and collaboration. Organizations must follow a regular test breach drill to strengthen their process over time. Prioritizing tasks after threat detection is the foremost thing to do which will depend on how grave a situation is. 

3. Prioritize tasks after risk assessment

After weak security links of a network have been identified, it becomes essential to prioritize them based on the risk posed to your business. Figuring out the vulnerabilities of your business, leads to the  subsequent step which is to start working on it. Prioritizing tasks can save a lot of time and danger to your organization. This will assist you in deciding why and how to work towards improving your security posture, in addition to informing the  danger of future attacks. Security ratings are provided while assessing the risk, a letter grade is given for your security posture based on how much it protects the essential data. A letter grade report helps you in knowing your position in terms of security structure. It gives you an outlook of weak links that needs your supervision. Once you’re down this lane, it’s time to begin threat management and fixing. 

4. Establish a DevSecOps practice

DevSecOps stands for Development Security Operations. It’s a security enhancement approach for providing security automation through a platform that will impart safety throughout an organization. It’s critical for employees to be well versed with the importance of using suitable security applications. Securing the software and hardware of a corporation before any cyber assault occurs can save a lot of hard work and efforts of the employees of that organization. You should not wait for annual security audits to take place for finding security breaches, rather be careful throughout the year. Enforcing a cyber protection application will assist in everyday protection via utility tracking.

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)– Allows identification of vulnerabilities within your system by studying your code.

Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)– With this kind of testing, administrators can look at things through the viewpoint of a cyber attacker to assist find the susceptible weak points within a network. 

Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST)– It has combined applications of both SAST and DAST to use software and for monitoring software performance.

Runtime Application Self- Protection (RASP)– It provides real-time information from the application to stumble on and detect attacks as they take place. 

5. Break down silos

IT teams working within silos are always at a greater chance of risk due to the fact that they don’t communicate directly with the organization at times of prevailing threats. It is crucial to establish a collaborative subculture between all the teams to assist them in appreciating their bond, and comprehending how the occasion of a breach affects all the teams. Rather than blaming each other after a security failure, teams should be more communicative amongst themselves to understand the importance of how teamwork can prove to be a boon for solving security issues in a speedy manner. DevSecOps platform helps ensure the information exchange by reinforcing a communicative and collaborative culture. 

6. Track security via automated threat detection solutions

In today’s world, where such a large amount of data is available, nobody can keep track of all that is happening. It is impossible to manually perform required security activities within time to keep your network secure. Thus, it is only imperative to incorporate automated technologies to minimize time consumption and human errors. 

Introducing automation in security networks at your business is extremely crucial to your organization’s safety when aiming to mitigate upcoming security dangers. An automated security system imparts help to IT professionals in detecting a cyberattack, while permitting professionals to be aware of their strategy in case of a larger threat. Also, automated cybersecurity applications help in reducing planning time and in minimizing cyberattack from spreading throughout your networks. 

With the help of security metrics, a corporation can find ways to measure the effectiveness of their security posture. The efficacy of metrics differ for different measures of security. So it’s up to an organization what aspects of security they want to measure. It’s essential that you are monitoring metrics that affect your firm’s operations and strategies. You have to make sure that security metrics measures align with your security demands. Metrics data assist in finding key performance indicators (KPIs) that help in tracking and securing, so the facts they analyze should be dependable. Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) can help automating cybersecurity risk detection by incorporating security into your app so that it can spot and eliminate prevailing threats without manual intervention. 

7. Stay updated

You can’t let your security tools cease working if you want a safe and secure organization. Security software and tools should be regularly updated in order to reap their maximum benefits. Security teams have to be well prepared and organized to make everyday changes and adjustments to stay on top of the latest improvements in the field of security. Teams ought to boost up their technologies in order to prevent hackers from taking over their network. This will help in strengthening your organization’s security posture. While bringing new changes to your network, double checking the organization’s security posture should be your priority. 

8. Make your employees aware 

Last but not the least, educate your employees of the possible cyberattacks. It’s the foremost and simplest way to avoid huge security breaches. All kinds of organizations are susceptible to cyberattacks and should be well prepared for upcoming risks. They should be able to detect warnings that arrive before large attacks. Employees’ awareness of such threats will provide them with the capability to mitigate dangers. Regular security training must be provided to all the teams of an organization. 

Conclusion

All the important aspects of strengthening your organization’s cybersecurity have been discussed in this article. To conclude, I want to leave you with these wise words said by Edward Snowden “Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say”.