As we have seen in the press recently with the Mother Of All Breaches (MOAB) attack, Cybersecurity is vital to any business. With so many ways for attacks and breaches to target your organisation in 2024, it’s now more important than ever to ensure that you know exactly how you can protect your business from the worst of cyberattacks.
But knowing precisely what you must do to protect yourself is much more complicated than it seems. There is so much to consider regarding cybersecurity that it can be overwhelming even to take the first step to improving your business’s security posture — especially if you’re a small to medium organisation without the personnel to handle it.
In this blog, we will examine five steps all SME businesses must take to ensure that their security standards are up to scratch for 2024.
A cybersecurity assessment will allow you to examine your business’s security measures and note any vulnerabilities or gaps in your attack surface. This will enable you to address them and ensure they are quickly fixed.
This is important for many reasons:
Holistic security measures affect your whole organisation instead of specific aspects. They are meant to cover all bases and ensure at least some coverage throughout your business.
This is helpful, as it lets you:
The most important tool against cybersecurity issues is knowledge. After all, knowing what steps to take will ensure that you take the right ones and that you’re prepared for anything that might come your way.
Educating and training your staff is a vital part of this. By doing so, you ensure that everyone in your organisation is aware of what needs to be done and why it’s so important, meaning that you can create a security-aware culture throughout the workplace.
The best way to do this is to run training sessions with your staff to ensure everyone is clear on what is expected regarding security. We at Aura Technology use KnowBe4, the world’s first and largest security awareness training platform, to keep all staff educated to prevent falling victim to cyber-attacks.
Adopting a training scheme will also allow you to track their progress and help them brush up on aspects they may find challenging or don’t fully understand.
Updates are released to ensure that your software and tools are current. While this is important for features, providing the latest security updates and patches is also essential. This helps keep you safe against issues within the software that might prove to be a vulnerability.
Failing to do these updates on time means leaving an opening for someone to take advantage of them and wreak havoc on your organisation. This is why ensuring you have an updated management system ensures you get the patches you need as soon as they become available.
While it’s vital to prevent cybersecurity situations, having a plan of action in place to ensure your response is adequate is essential to ensuring that you’re ready in the event of a catastrophe.
An incident response framework will give you a back-to-basic way to recover and get your organisation back on track if everything goes wrong. Implementing one as early as possible allows you to easily update and revise it based on your organisation’s needs and specifics.
The most common framework used to create a plan for catastrophe is the NIST incident response life cycle:
Your organisation’s cybersecurity is vital, as it will protect you from malicious hackers or anyone else who wants access to your most sensitive information and data.
If you want to start taking steps to protect your organisation but need a helping hand, reach out to us today. Our experts are here to help and will ensure you’ve got a guide along your whole cybersecurity journey.
Get in touch now and see how we can help.