With cyberattacks becoming increasingly sophisticated, businesses need a proactive approach to protect against threats and ensure compliance. While a security-first approach may require an upfront investment, it saves businesses in the long run by avoiding costly downtime and data breaches.
A security-first approach is about restructuring your thinking, so cybersecurity is a core consideration rather than an afterthought. It ensures robust protection while upholding compliance and fostering trust.
Automated Monitoring
Constant monitoring helps businesses identify their risk exposure, making decision-making easier in building a solid cybersecurity program for the enterprise. It also helps companies avoid costly breaches and face non-compliance penalties.
Automated continuous monitoring gathers data from various sources and normalizes it, allowing security analysts to spot threats quickly. It enables them to take action without manually copying and pasting information between tools.
It can also help with scalability, allowing the team to handle a large volume of work without hiring additional resources. It frees up staff time to focus on high-priority tasks.
It also accelerates threat detection, as automated tools can eliminate alert fatigue, resulting in human operators being overloaded with security alerts. Additionally, automation can immediately execute a security playbook in response to detected incidents, potentially containing and resolving them with minimal human intervention.
Patch Management
Updating software systems is crucial for cybersecurity patches that fix website vulnerabilities and enable IT teams to protect assets from hackers.
Creating a formal patch management process that sets up procedures and deadlines for efficiently deploying patches is crucial. These policies should help IT and security teams create inventories of assets like third-party applications, operating systems, and endpoint firmware so they can apply patches promptly.
It’s also critical to thoroughly evaluate prospective patch releases in a lab environment to ensure they won’t interfere with mission-critical systems or impact asset performance. It’s also best to deploy patches in batches rather than sweeping them across the entire network to limit downtime and allow IT staff to monitor assets post-patching to identify issues if needed.
Anti-Virus Scanning
Many viruses have evolved to evade detection, but proactive risk management uses heuristic-based scanning to search for code snippets unique to viruses. This method also looks at a program’s behavior and executes new programs in a closed-off environment to see how they behave to identify threats.
When heuristic-based scans detect something suspicious, the virus is automatically sent to an analysis center. Here, the virus is matched with a database of known viruses to quickly find a vaccine and clean the virus off a system.
While assuming no breach will ever happen is irresponsible, a well-established proactive approach will limit damage and lead attackers to find an easier target. To get the most from your proactive cybersecurity measures, keep all software up to date and always perform a manual check of third-party ecosystems.
Backups
Data backups are essential because they allow businesses to recover files, folders, databases, and email accounts if an attack occurs. A comprehensive backup solution also encrypts data to prevent hackers from accessing it without detection.
Moreover, these solutions often include offsite backup options that provide additional redundancy to protect against cyber compromise or natural disasters. It allows companies to minimize downtime and ensure the continuity of their operations.
Backups can also help businesses recover from internal threats, such as disgruntled employees. That is because 34% of all breaches originate from within the organization. Proactive cybersecurity measures watch employees and their activities to find any suspicious behavior that could lead to a violation. That makes it easier for them to detect and respond to unauthorized activity before it becomes a severe issue.
Disaster Recovery
Unlike anti-virus scanning software that compares incoming threats to a database of known attacks, proactive management measures include identifying and eliminating the vulnerabilities that attackers exploit. This method reduces the time hackers have to attack your business and mitigates the damage they can cause.
A cybersecurity disaster recovery plan lets your team respond quickly when an attack hits. It should detail a process for notifying customers, employees, and stakeholders and a timeline of how your company will get back up and running after the threat is resolved.
Cybersecurity must be treated like any other aspect of a business’s operations. Too often, companies wait until after an attack before contacting MSSPs, cyber insurance providers, and legal professionals. By implementing proactive cybersecurity management strategies, businesses can avoid the costs and disruptions of cyber attacks and other unplanned IT issues.
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