6 Ways To Improve Your Business’s IT Security

Cybersecurity is an important aspect of protecting your business.

Increasingly, the major threats to organizations are more digital than they are physical. Unfortunately, many small businesses feel underprepared to manage a serious threat. In fact, many of them are. If you want to protect your business’s interests, consider upgrading your IT security.

1) Understand What You Are Protecting

The essential first step toward protecting your business is to understand what you are trying to protect. In other words, you should evaluate your information assets and prioritize your defence accordingly. For example, your customers’ payment information is likely a top priority. However, your upcoming press releases are likely not.

This doesn’t mean that you should open the door for low-priority assets. However, it does mean that you should focus your efforts and resources on your most important assets. 

2) Leverage Data

Implement security monitoring solutions. As in the rest of the business world, cybersecurity is best when decisions are based on data rather than just best guesses. By monitoring for suspicious traffic, you can look for potential weak points and also determine what is likely to be a top target.

Furthermore, you can examine the nature of breaches at other organizations. Studying these will help you to better prepare your organization for a successful defence. 

3) Implement Single Sign On

Single sign-on solutions can help you to improve your authentication security significantly. It allows your team members to sign in to every service used by your organization with a single set of user credentials. Since there is only one password to remember, those credentials can be made more secure. One hard-to-crack password is better than a dozen weak passwords.

Additionally, your SSO can be further hardened by using multi-factor authentication. This requires the user to have something (typically a phone app) to receive a one-time password in addition to the normal password. Having multiple authentication factors significantly increases the challenge of hacking a system. 

4) Train Your People

People continue to be the weak point of every business’s IT security. Most people just want to get to work without having to worry about security procedures. If they don’t understand the logic of the cybersecurity policies, they will do whatever they can to make their own lives easier. This often results in making breaches easier.

A good training program can help your people to better understand the principles of security and the reasoning behind your business’s practices. Simply training people on how to identify phishing emails can be a huge boost to your security.

5) Use Threat Detection

It is important to identify and respond to threats promptly. No amount of security will protect your business’s IT resources against all attacks indefinitely. So, you need to know when they are happening and what is happening.

Threat intelligence and detection systems give you some advanced warning about potential breaches. While you won’t be able to hop on a computer and fight off the hacker like on a TV show, you may have an opportunity to lock down the exploit being used by the attacker.

6) Have an Incident Response Plan

Security incidents will happen. If your business is high profile enough to be the victim of a targeted attack (as opposed to an untargeted attack such as widespread malware), then someone will likely try to get into your systems.

Therefore, it is important to have a plan for how to minimize the impact of a breach and prepare for any operational or legal fallout.

For example, simply having a defined plan for how you will analyse the attack and make changes can help. As with all crisis-response situations, it is important to think through how you will act before you need to deal with the emergency situation.

Get Started

The above tips can help you to make your business’s cybersecurity stronger. Get started today and make your organization’s IT security practices, training and tools more effective.