Cyber-crime costs the UK economy £27 billion annually, with businesses paying the lion’s share at £21 billion. Because cyber-attacks are becoming more sophisticated and frequent, companies around the world must invest in cybersecurity not just to keep data and information secure from external threats, but to keep themselves secure as well.
A cyber event could potentially have a significant effect on your business if it is not managed properly. To protect yourself against potential threats, you must develop an overall risk mitigation strategy that identifies all IT vulnerabilities and strengths as well as your business processes and people.
Definition of risk mitigation
A cybersecurity risk mitigation plan should include guidelines and protocols for cybersecurity to reduce the consequences of a cyberattack. This includes preventing, detecting, and recovering from a cyberattack. Cybercriminals constantly develop new ways to evade risk control procedures, so your organisation must constantly monitor and adjust safety procedures to stay protected.
Luckily, these six simple cybersecurity risk mitigation strategies can be implemented to keep your business protected from potential threats.
1. Assessment of risk
Before developing the risk mitigation plan, a cybersecurity risk assessment should be carried out, which will identify any potential vulnerabilities in the security controls of your company. You can identify the assets of your company as well as the security measures in place through a risk assessment. IT security personnel may be able to recognise any potential vulnerabilities and should address them first. You can see live security ratings in real-time. You can also get a security rating for your organisation and third-party vendors.
2. Network access control policies
When you’ve located the most crucial problems and evaluated your resources, your next step should be to establish network access restrictions to help reduce the danger of internal dangers. Companies are utilising safety techniques like zero trust, which evaluates each individual’s level of trustworthiness and user access permissions based on each person’s occupation to minimise security breaches that could occur as a result of staff mistake or lack of cyber security best practices. Security breaches caused by employee carelessness or lack of cybersecurity knowledge are minimised. Because the number of connected devices on a network is increasing, endpoint security has also become an issue.
3. Network traffic monitoring
It is critical to keep a close watch on the security of your business by taking proactive steps. Every day, there are reportedly 2,200 cybercrimes, so your business should continuously monitor online traffic and the security settings in order to spot and address potential problems. Instead of attempting to manually recognize and deal with any possible security threats, resources can be utilised to get a thorough understanding of the IT infrastructure at any given time. This way, security teams will be able to detect and handle new dangers swiftly.
4. Incident response plan
An incident response plan is an important part of an organisation’s cybersecurity system. All IT security personnel as well as non-technical staff should be able to follow the steps they should take if an incident occurs. Data breaches have become more difficult to prevent, so an incident response plan must be prepared before one occurs. When a breach occurs, companies can react quickly and efficiently if they have an incident response plan in place. The damage can be limited.
5. Reduce attack surface
Businesses can evaluate the security status of their corporations and the dangers they face by evaluating all of the entrances, weak spots, and confidential data they possess. Any company’s attack surface might include firewall patches, software updates, web applications, and workforce. Companies can identify and reduce any dangers if they correctly assess information about entry points.
6. Regularly update patches
Cybercrooks know that software vendors release patches frequently, so that they can take advantage of unpatched vulnerabilities. By knowing the patch release schedules of your software and services, your IT security team can stay one step ahead of hackers and know the times when to patch.
Protect your business with risk mitigation strategies
Businesses should have a proactive cybersecurity strategy for risk mitigation in place to identify and reduce any cyber threats given the growing number of malicious actors. Work with INTELLIWORX’s managed security specialists to determine the right security measures and services for your company to keep your digital environment protected and manage cybersecurity risk.
