Here's how you can safeguard against cybersecurity threats when adopting cloud technology in franchising.

If you push regular risk assessment and decision making to organizational business owners, it will help make cybersecurity operations more effective, fostering accountability and ensuring that security decisions are aligned with business priorities. This will likely encourage employees to take ownership more easily, follow security best practices and ultimately enhance the overall security posture of your organization. To help, you should integrate security tools and processes right into business workflows to minimize disruption to employee productivity and user experience. Supplement by tracking cybersecurity metrics that are relevant to goals of the individual business owners.

Cloud technology bring a powerful an but it comes with risks. Secure it now, or face costly consequences later. Key considerations: MFA: Simple to implement, yet highly effective. It’s an easy win against unauthorized access. No brainer. Penetration Testing: Regularly test from a hacker’s perspective to uncover vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and policy violations. Security Awareness: Your employees are the first line of defense. Invest in their training and incentivize vigilance. Especially Phishing, still a top threat vector.

Este passo crucial permite que se identifique os tipos de dados que ser?o armazenados e processados, bem como os riscos potenciais associados a cada um deles.

Before using cloud services, conduct a thorough risk assessment. Identify the types of data you'll store and process, such as customer data, internal communications, and proprietary information. Determine the potential risks, including data breaches, data loss, compliance violations, and service disruptions. Establish a risk profile by assessing the sensitivity, impact, and likelihood of threats. Use this profile to guide your security measures, such as encryption and access controls, and choose cloud service providers with strong security features and compliance with relevant regulations. This ensures your data is adequately protected and aligns with your business needs.

Managing risk effectively when migrating workloads to the cloud is crucial. Alongside a robust risk management process, investing in an automated cloud security posture analysis (cspm) tool can significantly enhance your security posture. These tools continuously monitor and assess cloud infrastructures, services, and applications for misconfigurations and compliance issues. The cspm tools help maintain a secure cloud posture by recommending best practices, enforcing security policies, and identifying misconfigurations across cloud accounts and services. Remember that a compromised asset from comparatively less critical cloud segment could allow lateral movement into critical segments.

Only consider iso27001 certified cloud platform whether it is SaaS, PaaS or IaaS. Do not compromise on this as the standard doesn’t just cover information security elements, backups strategy, vulnerabilities management, incident handling, business continuity, supplier vendor management approach. Without any of those elements covered your workloads will always be exposed - can your risk assessment tolerate the lack of above?

I agree with the need for a thorough risk assessment before adopting cloud services. To ensure robust protection, it's crucial to classify data and apply appropriate encryption. Additionally, it's vital to comply with industry-specific standards such as GDPR for personal data or HIPAA for healthcare data. These measures will ensure that data is protected and all relevant regulations are met.

Human is a bio-chemical machine and prone to repeating the mistakes again and again. Therefore training and increasing cyber awareness shall be a continuous process. Organizations can arrange small quizes on cybersecurity, randome or regular compliance tets and surprise checks to measure awareness of their staff to security. Remember the staff is the first line of defence.

Company Users are a part of a mature defence mechanism established in the information security management system for any organisations that at least think about information security. Training plays a vital role to ensure the team navigate through daily noise of phishing over email or telephone, dodgy links and sites that just wait to collect data/credentials related to the member of your team. Establish Information Security Training agenda, deliver Phishing, GDPR related video nuggets throughout the calendar year. No more than 1h every six months to help your user base become part of your defence line. Update training contents once per year and publish company wide.

It's crucial to educate users about the secure environment and help them understand their responsibility and ability to impact information security, all within the context of the OSI model, where they, as 'Layer 8,' represent the human or social layer in cybersecurity. My advice can be: 1. Training Programs 2. Phishing Simulations 3. Clear Security Policies 4. Constant Communication 5. Positive Reinforcement 6. Monitoring and Reporting 7. Continuous Evaluation, this is forever and ever.

In today's world the digital Era, it is not required to have a Technical degree but to have cyber security education to survive securely in the technical world. Just as we educate individuals about fire safety, empowering employees with cyber security training is crucial against the digital threats. Regular training sessions push towards a mindset of continuous learning and adaptation ensuring readiness to address evolving threats. Configuring cloud specific security measures to its potential enhances protection through Central security and adaptive responses. This contribution helps to save the digital assets effectively, which align with our goals and commitment to preserve and protect digital resources.

Implement MFA, ideally privileged accounts will be separate to standard user accounts, provide access on needs to know basis. Review admin access at least once per month - especially super admin access. Establish checks against your data hosted in cloud including data labelling and classification - who has access to records (sensitive or not). Establish how the data is shared internally and externally. Steer away from anonymous access for data which hasn’t been classified as “public in the first place”.

Being up to date with the latest updates and patches holds important for cybersecurity, but they also present risks in their own right such as homegrown zero day vulnerabilities. In zero day vulnerability the flaws are discovered recently and hence can be used to hack one before a patch is out. This is despite the risks - businesses need to ensure that systems, such as cloud-connected POS and back-office software are patched. It covers you for known vulnerabilities and shows that your data is protected to your customers and hackers.

Breaches are inevitable. Be prepared. 1. Have a detailed blue print: steps to identify, contain, eradicate, and recover. 2. Speak the same language: Frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK (Tactics and Techniques) and D3FEND (Countermeasures), NIST/ISO. 3. Train your team like an orchestra: Every member knows their part, ensuring swift, and effective response. Master the orchestration with frequent, realistic drills, that emphasize reducing Mean-Time-To-Detect (MTTD) and Mean-Time-To-Remediate. Your defense is based on how well your technology, processes, and people work in harmony.

Establish business continuity policy with senior stake holders. Map out key activities and define impact - consider how long organisation can function without specific process/activity before serious degradation of service becomes visible or impacts the organisation product/financials. Create plans for recovering from a disaster (natural or human made). Ensure recovery plans are at least “dry tested” once per year. Record results and measure effectiveness of the plan.

Establish a strong foundation for cloud security by implementing clear policies and procedures that govern how your cloud resources are provisioned, accessed, and managed within your organization. These should also clearly define roles and responsibilities for cloud security, monitoring, billing and approvals across different teams. Policies should also translate effectively into routine practices that set you up to continuously monitor your cloud activity for suspicious behaviour to identify and address potential security threats, promptly.