An increase in remote working culture during the pandemic made inroads for several cyberattacks. Many companies who never paid much attention to enterprise security had lots of unprotected data and poor cybersecurity practices in place, which left them vulnerable to cybersecurity threats. While such events were unfortunate, organizations need to learn from them and make security best practices a part of their culture. This article discusses 7 steps that organizations can take to make their businesses immune or at least better prepared to tackle cybersecurity threats.
Step 1: Assess Your Current Enterprise Network Security Infrastructure
Documenting your enterprise security architecture’s current state will allow you to create a starting point that you can use to improve your enterprise network security. It can help you to identify the gaps that need to be fixed. An IT risk assessment of your enterprise network security will also help you identify the possible risks so that you stand a better chance to prevent them altogether.
Step 2: Develop a Target Security Architecture
With your current security architecture as a reference, consider the security improvements that are possible in your organization, keeping security policies, procedures, and defenses in mind. Develop your target security architecture while considering the possible threats that you found out during the IT risk assessment.
Step 3: Create Your Enterprise Security Framework
The next step is to create a security framework that outlines your organization’s objectives, security risks, fulfills regulatory and internal compliance requirements, and resolves conflicting business objectives. Involve your IT executives while creating the framework to ensure your IT objectives align with current and future business objectives and the IT/security needs. Keeping all these factors in mind will make the upgradations and implementation of enterprise security easier.
Step 4: Adopt a Proactive Approach to Avert the Risks
While your security framework will be there to take action in the event of a cyberattack, it is mostly reactive in nature. To ensure complete security and avert the possible risks, it’s better to take proactive security measures. You can create proactive responses to the threats and outline them in your enterprise security framework.
Step 5: Make Your Employees Aware
Your employees are your biggest strength when it comes to security. Train, inform, and make your employees care more about the cybersecurity of your organization. Make security training an important part of your onboarding process. Discuss data ethics with your employees; educate them on data privacy policies.
Step 6: Classify Your Data Correctly and Implement Role-based Access Control
Classification of your data is important to control who is supposed to have access to it. Once you have classified the data, streamline the permissions process by assigning different departments and sectors different permissions.
Step 7: Implement Physical Security Barriers
While you may have top-notch security measures in your organizations, such as encrypting all data, implementing firewalls, patch management, and monitoring data, you should never ignore the physical security threats. Physical threats, such as – theft, device damage, and internal security breaches, can be easily averted by implementing physical security barriers. For this purpose, companies must audit physical safeguards to get a better picture of which physical security barriers can be implemented.
Conclusion
As businesses become increasingly dependent on technology, designing and implementing a strategy for enterprise security should be prioritized at all costs. Companies should never remain complacent on their present strategies for enterprise security and look for better reasons to invest in enterprise security. A timely assessment of their current security framework will help them get a better picture of where they stand in terms of enterprise security and which improvements can be done to ensure complete enterprise safety.
