Cyber criminals are constantly employing new tools and strategies to in ltrate businesses — making it no longer a question of if, but when systems will be breached. That’s why it is so important to understand the security landscape, develop a strategy and engage the right suppliers to help you implement or strengthen your customer’s security posture.
Doing so will help minimize the impact of any security event on their business. After all, the faster you can help them detect and eject a threat, the less damage it can do to their organization, and the more you will be the hero.
Top Benefits
- Protects Personal Info – One of the most valuable commodities in the digital age is personal information. If a virus is able to obtain personal information regarding your employees or customers, they are quite capable of selling that information on, or even using it to steal their money.
- It Can Protect Your Business – The biggest advantage is that the best in IT security cyber security solutions can provide comprehensive digital protection to your business. This will allow your employees to surf the internet as and when they need, and ensure that they aren’t at risk from potential threats.
- Protects Productivity – Viruses can slow down personal computers to a crawl, and make working on them practically impossible. This can cause a lot of wasted time for your employees, and can often bring your entire business to a standstill.
- Allows Employees to Work Safely – Without the best cyber security solutions for your business, you and your employees are constantly at risk from a potential cyber-attack. If your system, or even individual computers, become infected than that can really hamper their productivity and even force you to replace computers.
- Denies Spyware – Spyware is a form of cyber infection which is designed to spy on your computer actions, and relay that information back to the cyber-criminal. A great cyber security solution, such as Fortinet’s FortiGate firewall, can prevent this spyware from taking effect and ensure that your employees’ actions remain private and confidential within your workplace.
- Stop Your Website from Going Down – As a business, the chances are you’re hosting your own website. If your system becomes infected, there is a very real chance that your website be forced to shut down. This means that not only will you be losing money from missed transactions, but you will also lose customer trust and certain viruses can often do lasting damage to a system.
Key Features
- Good analytics - Every organization in every industry can benefit from good analytics. It’s easier to put your finger on a threat if you’ve rated your risks, and have a good historical picture of where your risks have been in the past. When you have good data, you can clearly see your risk, monitor situations that could pose a threat, and move quickly when there’s an issue. In fact, good data can help you even after a data breach or attack. Ponemon’s 2019 Cost of A Data Breach report found that companies that use security analytics reduce the cost of data breaches by an average of $200,000.
- Coverage of your biggest external threats - Many threats come from outside your organization. Ponemon’s 2018 State of Cybersecurity in Small & Medium Size Businesses (SMBs) reportfound that 37% of incidents were confirmed attacks from an external source. These external threats tend to take the form of hacking and phishing, and tend to come into an organization in a variety of ways: stolen credentials, Denial of Service, compromised web applications, and email attachments. (For example, 93% of spam emails are now vehicles for ransomware.) Your security platform should be able to monitor your threats, and let you know when your organization has been compromised or targeted by malicious activity.
- A defense against internal threats - While most of an organization’s threats tend to come from outside, occasionally the call is coming from inside the house. According to Egress’s Insider Data Breach survey, 95% of businesses are worried about an insider breach. This doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve got bad actors in your organization — most of the time internal threats are mistakes (like misconfiguration of AWS buckets or unapproved workarounds) or bad choices by employees. Occasionally, however, an internal actor will get involved with truly malicious activity like espionage or theft — Egress found that 61% of IT leaders believe their employees put sensitive company data at risk maliciously in the last year. Whatever their reasons for exposing you to risk, a good cyber security platform should be able to quickly alert you to mistakes or misuse that could be putting your data or networks at risk.
- Compliance - Information security means different things in different industries. Every industry and organization — from healthcare to finance – has a unique set of regulations, standards, and best practices when it comes to information security. Your cyber security platform should help your organization achieve, maintain and prove compliance with whatever regulations are relevant to your industry and geographical location.
- Manage risk across your entire ecosystem - Third parties — your vendors, partners and contractors — are a critical source of risk to your business. They often have access to your data and networks, but you can’t always require them to adhere to specific standards or best practices. It’s no surprise that third parties are a significant source of risk — Ponemon’s 2019 Cost of A Data Breach report found that when third parties cause a breach, the cost increases by more than $370,000. Yet, according to Protoviti’s 2019 Vendor Risk Management Benchmark Study, only 4 in 10 organizations have a fully mature vendor risk management process in place. Your cyber security platform should let you monitor and manage the risks posed by your vendors. Your cyber security platform must allow you to monitor and manage risk no matter where it occurs — outside the company, inside your organization, or in your supply chain.
- Threat prevention, detection, and response - Last year, asurvey published in CISOmagazine found that 31% of CISOs want their security platform to block more than 95% of attacks and track those attacks they can’t block, providing continuous alerts so that the security team can track down the suspicious activity and eliminated it.
- Continuous monitoring - When it comes to cyber security, it’s no good relying on snapshots of your risk, or compliance. Yes, you and your vendors might be compliant right now, but tomorrow, a patch might not be installed in a timely manner, or someone might misconfigure a server. A security platform that doesn’t provide continuous monitoring is leaving holes in your compliance and leaving you open to risk.