3 Ways to Start Securing Your Organization Today

So...what are you doing to protect your organization from getting hacked? Like the image for this article (which was me hiking) I think of securing your organization as that first step.

If you're like many leaders, it's easier to kick the can. Unfortunately, this only works for a while and we've moved from a time in cyber security that has evolved from "if" to "when" you will experience an incident.

According to IBM, a cyber incident is going to cost your organization over $4 million in 2023. This may raise your anxiety, but, like most leaders, we get hit with the next thing and we delay doing anything about our security.

Cyber is complex. We have team members that work from home, local networks to protect, applications, cloud and stopping whatever our team member just clicked on. In addition, even if the tools and services are in place - is there any process for how to handle the different types of incidents that can take place?

Take a deep breath. Let me give you a few things you can start with today:

1. Get an outside perspective: hire a competent security firm to give you an objective perspective. This often helps cut through the internal bureaucracy or team members that want to protect turf over what's best for the organization. These outside perspectives will deliver a report and should be categorized in the order of importance. [plug for Datapath - we do this!]

2. Tighten up what you have already: some of the biggest gaps we see in security is the “set it and forget it.” We see firewalls in their default mode that although they may be products that are best in the industry – they leave you wide open for a disaster. This also goes for cloud configurations, servers, network equipment and especially user accounts. Becoming stagnant will often leave a wide open door for being attacked.

3. Collaborate: working in silos leaves aspects of security in a bottleneck or a gray area. Security should be the responsibility of your entire organization. We see this accomplished most successfully through a team approach - even if they're temporary.

Concepts like "bubbles" are helpful to recruit small teams to work together on glaring security problems for a short period of time. These short-term teams help the responsibility feel like less of a commitment while helping to get more people in your organization security-minded working on security-focused projects.

?I hope these ideas help. Any step forward towards building layers to protect your organization will save you hours of unnecessary stress and help prevent potential disruption.

I'm always here as a resource - feel free to reach out with any questions regarding how to better secure your organization.