A well planned cyber attack could bring your company huge financial losses, however the impact of cybersecurity is not limited to financial losses alone. A single incident can lead to downtime of IT applications, giving rise to inferior customer experiences. Cyber breach can cause non-compliance with regulatory mandates inviting penalties and legal actions.
Due to the overwhelming downsides of a poorly managed cybersecurity infrastructure we put together a short list of six good practices that almost all companies could implement and utilize.
1. Build a strong security culture: A vigorous security strategy begins by inculcating the culture of security in an organization. This can be managed by placing the chief information security officer (CISO) and his strategies at the center of the organization. It explains the importance of the practice and defines roles of every entity within the organization, highlighting that security is not just the responsibility of the IT team.
2. Empower the CISO: By empowering the CISO, an organization ensures that critical security-related changes within the organization can be driven effectively.
3. Back strategy with the right investments: Estimating investments into cybersecurity initiatives usually depends on the profile of the company, its customers, the kind of data it handles and its sensitivity. A realistic estimation of the risk profile is essential to ensure that the investments in people, processes and technology stay ahead of the cyber threat landscape.
4. Stay ahead of the curve: Investing in threat intelligence platforms, threat hunting capabilities and other emerging technologies is a must.
5. Build a robust governance system: Setting up an information security council that has participation from the leadership and other teams of the company helps build effective initiatives.
6. Supply chain management: An organization usually doesn’t have total control on its vendor and partner’s systems and if a breach were to take place it could ruin the entire supply chain. Hence, it is important to maintain robust corporate governance of the supply chain.