Safeguarding sensitive business data
As your business grows, you’ll build up large stores of highly sensitive information. These key data sets could include customer details, product specifications, transactional records and employee data. If a data breach occurred and these got into the wrong hands, your business could face huge consequences. So, it is imperative that you devise a comprehensive IT security plan to protect your sensitive business data.
The best way to start is by employing a layered structure to your IT security model. This ensures your business experiences varied levels of protection to cover multiple vulnerable access points. Below we explore the core elements involved in developing a robust business IT security plan. From key preventative actions to hardware and software aspects, we provide expert insight into the basics of IT security.
What to include in your business IT security plan
There are certain security actions which shouldn’t be considered merely optional for your business. Identifying, managing and mitigating threats are now a crucial part of your business IT security plan. Here we uncover each of these steps and their importance in safeguarding your systems:
Identification of threat
There are a few key parts of proper threat identification:
- Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) monitor network traffic for malicious or suspicious behaviour.
- Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) continuous monitoring systems with immediate action taken to prevent threats from escalating.
- Flagging and Alert Generation is a way of configuring your system to raise flags and alerts based on known patterns, rules and anomalies.
- Data collection is where you collect logs to monitor and analyse potential threats.
Threat identification requires establishing a centralised facility for data monitoring and risk assessment. These are known as Security Operations Centres or SOCs. Here you will define your potential threats, types of threats and any threats to key assets. Subsequently, you will be able to understand what your business should be prioritising and what systems and data should be monitored.
Accurate and timely detection of threats is vital in securing your business data. By prioritising threat identification, you can benefit from the early detection of cyberattacks. This gives your IT teams a head start in prepping and implementing defensive plans that can mitigate the damage. Overall, quick and effective threat identification can limit a breach from occurring, prevent data theft and reduce downtime.
Threat management
After a threat has been successfully identified, the exact scope of its effect and its quantitative damage must be analysed. Moreover, the threat must be defined and understood before proper communication is sent regarding the risks involved.
Therefore, threat management has four basic elements in your business IT security plan:
- Risk cataloguing involves documenting and asserting the threat, based on its type, source, method of attack, system targeted and more. Your information is then stored in a database for further analysis.
- Threat quantification calculates the exact level of damage caused by the attack. This is done through assessing immediate and long-term effects, as well as estimating overall costs (financial, data, disruption).
- Risk measurement identifies the possible consequences of the threat. This categorises the severity of threats, likelihood of attack and draws up scenarios to prepare for contingencies.
- Communication of threat involves letting all the stakeholders know of the imminent attack and its effects.
Threat mitigation
After analysing the threats, security experts should then employ mitigation techniques to address the threat. Every attack exploits a pre-existing vulnerability or flaw specific to your system that must be addressed to reduce the risk of a breach. From this point, security engineers will determine if your business’ pre-existing tools can be updated to work effectively in your IT security plan.
If your systems are considered too vulnerable or at risk, you may then need to design new systems from scratch. Sometimes entire infrastructures are redefined to fix critical system vulnerabilities.
What security features to include in your business IT plan
Hardware security features
As mentioned, to mitigate threats and reduce the risk of attack, you must have additional layer of protection which tackles the root of your security vulnerability. This is where you must implement new hardware and software to protect your data.
The following hardware security features play an integral part in developing your business’ IT plan:
Firewall
A firewall is one of the first lines of defence in any cybersecurity system. It works by filtering incoming and outgoing traffic based on your specific configured settings. As such, this security feature forms a solid barrier both internal and external malicious threats.
By working continuously on all business devices, your firewall can help detect and block known threats in real time. Subsequently, firewalls control the authorised use of your business IT systems according to your settings. For example, it may prevent employees from accessing suspicious sites or block downloads from unverified sources. It will also keep a log of traffic patterns for your security team to refer to for analysis.
UPS system
Ensuring a continuous supply of power is critical to the safety of business servers and therefore must be considered in your IT security plan. If your server goes offline during a power outage, then it will become extremely vulnerable to cyberattacks. So, it is mandatory to have a separate Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) system.
Although its main purpose is to prevent data loss and maintain business continuity, your UPS also ensures continuous protection against cyber threats. Once your IT system is down, so is your security. So, the need for a backup power system is crucial to your IT security plan as it keeps your business protections up and running.
Physical locks
Aside from online data theft, many of your business’ data storage systems will be physical. Often, this means you must place confidential hard drives, flash drives and servers under physical lock and key. Flash drives must be locked inside secure storage facilities, and important server ports and switches must be placed behind cages. Additionally, business-owned laptops and CPUs should be confined to office spaces and placed under a numbered padlock.
These measures are vital for the safety of your physical data stores and ensures that only authorised personnel have access to critical infrastructure. As an additional layer protection to your storage systems, locks hugely prevent internal threats from materialising.
Software security features
Moreover, your business must employ security software modules with the latest updates and patches. These software features will compliment your new hardware security, ensuring comprehensive coverage of your systems. Here are just some of the basic software security features you should adopt:
Anti-virus software package
Your business IT security plan should include the basic anti-virus, spyware prevention and detection software. These combined protections will improve detection of common threats such as phishing, Trojans and ransomware. As a result of increased scans, malware and cyber threats identified will be blocked before they cause significant damages.
Ensure you are up to date with the software developer’s patches. These will address recent attack trends and vulnerabilities in your business devices. So, keep automatic updates switched on for your anti-virus – this could be the difference between a disruptive data theft or a successful breach prevention.
Spam and phishing filters
Phishing is a common form of cyberattack where hackers use social engineering tactics to extract personal information from a user via email. This is often in the form of malware-ridden links, downloads or attachments purporting to be legitimate websites or organisations. Phishing emails can appear in many forms, but applying strong spam filters is the best preventative action to take. These filters will identify and block such malicious content from entering your main inbox.
Many spam filters are now built into your business email systems, and can be configured by your admin. For example, to increase monitoring and filtering of known malicious emails, you can set up custom spam filters in Outlook and Gmail. These custom settings will scan incoming emails for potential threats and remove the known domains from your inbox.
Backup capabilities
The last resort of any security feature is a strong backup system. During unmitigated disasters, systems often need to reboot after downtime to return to core operations. As such, a backup facility is vital in preventing the loss of valuable information and quickly restoring data.
Your backup facility also protects against any data corruption during downtime itself. Any data copies stored there will be safe from hardware failures, accidental deletion, bugs or power outages. So, whatever causes your operations to go down, your backup facility exists as a saving grace, reducing any losses and minimising the time taken to recover files.
Get support for your business IT security plan
Our London-based IT support company help businesses craft and implement a comprehensive, fool-proof IT security plan to combat all threats. With experts in cybersecurity, consultancy and IT support services, we can provide you with end-to-end management of your IT system and its security. Simply reach out to our award-winning team at totality services to book your free consultation today.