When it comes to cyber security, organisations face an uncertain future full of threats. That’s why it’s best for businesses to ensure they are prepared for the worst, and protected against anything that cyber attackers can throw at them. But as the number of data breaches tops previous record highs, damages continue to pile up as business lose both money and reputation. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Today, we bring you 5 simple things you can do to manage cyber risk in 2018.
Identify The Risks
Before you can protect yourself against risks, you first need to know what they are. This means not only identifying your own unique risk points, but looking wider – discovering attack patterns, identifying trends and traffic that might indicate more imminent risks to your business. You also need to ensure that effective authentication processes are in place to assess whether the people, who are accessing your organisation and your data, are who they claim to be, and not intruders.
Get Management On Board
In order to be fully secure, the entire business needs to be on the same page, from board level down. This means the board needs to be made aware of and understand the potential constellation of risks that might threaten their company’s reputation, finances and operational performance. Cyber risk management should be a central part of any organisations governance processes, and senior executives of the business need to know whether their data assets are being protected adequately. By ensuring the board understand the risks, you can make real changes to risk management policies.
Open Communication Channels
It’s true that management needs to be 100% on board and understand the risks to the business, but at the end of the day they probably won’t be the ones doing the actual work to mitigate it. This means that there will need to be open, two-way communication, channels between the people responsible for managing risk and implementing solutions and the C-suite, allowing security executives to report changes directly to C-suite. This means that, by receiving up-to-date risk indicators and progress reports on a regular basis, the C-suite will be able to judge whether the security situation is improving.
Renew Incident Response
It doesn’t matter how well defended your business is, you still need a well prepared incident response plan in place in case you do come under cyber attack in future. Spend some time drawing up the worst case scenarios (and their possible offshoots) and create an action plan to deal with each one if it were to happen. This plan should be a roadmap to identify the people, processes and technology that will be required in the event of a breach. Once you’ve created your response plan, don’t just let it sit and gather dust – make sure it is reviewed and updated regularly. This will mean your response plan is always relevant, and everyone understands their responsibilities in case of an incident.
Always Promote Awareness
The biggest risk to your businesses cyber security will always be the people in the business. No matter how robust your systems are, people can still make mistakes, and this can circumvent even the most secure of systems. To mitigate this risk point, managers should always be promoting a cyber aware culture. At a minimum, this means ensuring employees are aware of the cyber risks that threaten the organisation, the ramifications of a breach and what their responsibilities as employees are.
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