Levelling up your security posture: 4 key steps

Cyberattacks are becoming more sophisticated and increasingly common . So it’s essential to continuously evaluate where your organisation is on its cybersecurity journey. This includes identifying next steps to strengthen your security posture in the future. Critically, it also involves deciding where to direct budget devoted to protecting your IT environment. A key piece of the puzzle when it comes to risk reduction is helping everyone in the organisation understand why cybersecurity awareness is important, and how they can help.

Join us on a journey to level up your organisation’s security posture. We’ll cover measures to emphasise the importance of cybersecurity awareness throughout the organisation. And once it has been recognised for its strategic importance to the business, we’ll provide advice on where to direct the security budget.

Step 1: Building defences from the ground up

The initial stage features a hands-on approach to security, focusing on resolving outside threats. In this phase, businesses often underestimate the risk of attack.

Most organisations have these fundamentals in place to ensure basic protection. And that’s a good start. But without knowledge or resources about what to do if an attack should make it past these initial defences (or how to minimise the risk of attacks happening in the first place), you’re not deriving the most value from these measures.

Step 2: Raising awareness

IT security threats are no longer confined to the IT department, as described in the video below.

Helping employees understand why cybersecurity awareness is important maximises an organisation’s defences throughout the business. There are several ways to get the entire business on board in the fight against threats .

This stage is complete when employees know the role they can play in helping reduce susceptibility to attacks. Now it’s time to move budget in a way that empowers them to do so.

Step 3: Reducing risk

At this stage, it’s crucial to obtain dedicated budget for cybersecurity that goes beyond the basics outlined in step 1. This should be spent on measures that aim to empower the end user to mitigate vulnerabilities, such as anti-phishing training. Given that?over 90% of all cyberattacks begin with a phishing email , this is a critical step in levelling up your security posture.

Step 4: Evaluating resource

After setting up measures to protect the business from within, the focus around cybersecurity awareness now centres on detection and response.

This is why it’s so important to have skilled security experts on hand — and preferably around the clock. An experienced professional is likely to have the depth of knowledge to take the most relevant data, apply this know-how to the situation and make strategic decisions on next steps. Acting quickly dramatically increases the likelihood of containing the threat.

Next steps

Relying on a partner with extensive knowledge about?protecting and securing data ?– and who understands the role of security as it fits into your data strategy as a whole – can be the ideal solution. Proact has years of experience helping organisations realise just how critical of a role security can play in their business. Contact us today at [email protected].