The risk of a data breach is something that all businesses need to take seriously. For the past decade it has become clear that all companies are vulnerable to this risk. If your systems are broken into, it could lead to a loss of sensitive company and customer data, hurt the reputation of your organization, lead to a loss of revenue and even result in regulatory fines and other actions.
One way to prevent this from happening is by improving your cyber resilience, which will help you more appropriately identify and respond to these threats. There are several tips that can be followed that could help to make your company more resilient.
Know Your Risks and Vulnerabilities
One of the most important parts of any cyber protection plan is to understand your risks and vulnerabilities. Between emails, cloud-based storage, employee password sharing and other challenges, all companies have risks that could make them vulnerable to an attack. You should spend time assessing what your weaknesses are and determining what could occur if you are a victim of an attack.
Focus on Improving Security
One you have identified the areas of concern, you should focus on better improving securing for those functions. Some options for this could include investing in better cloud-security and changing company policies to be more secure. By focusing on these areas of concern, you could make it harder for an outside threat to break into your systems and do damage.
Develop a Full Response Plan
While you can try to protect your company as well as possible, at some point a data attack may be inevitable. To be able to respond to an attack appropriately, you should establish a full response plan. There are several parts of a response plan that can help to make it effective. The first part is to know how to identify an attack that is taking place. You should have key metrics that can be followed that will help to identify threats when they occur.
Once a threat has been identified the focus needs to be on containment and eradication. This could help to limit the damage that is done. Following any attack, it is important to evaluate the response to identify what worked well and what didn’t and then make changes accordingly.
Have a Dedicated Response Team
If a data breach does occur, you will need to have a response team in place. There should be an established group of people in your organization that will be dedicated to managing one of these threats. This should include a chain of command and procedures in place for the steps to follow. Since a data hack can be a challenging and stressful situation, having these procedures in place already can help to limit the confusion and make it easier for you to respond appropriately.
Train and Educate Everyone
While you will need to have a team that can help you identify and respond to these threats, the responsibility to prevent them needs to be held by everyone at your company. A threat can occur quite simply if someone in your team is not aware of a risk and makes a mistake. Due to this, it is important that you train and educate your team regularly on what outside threats there are, what the red flags should be and what steps should be followed if a breach occurs.
Overall, finding a way to improve your cyber resilience is very important. By following these tips and steps, you can become more resilient and will be better positioned to manage and respond to threats.