We’re in week three of our fITness challenge! If you missed last week’s challenge, you can catch up here.
Week 3: Review Security Posture
After checking and testing your backups, it’s now time to review your security posture. This is critical in assessing your business’s ability to prevent, predict, and respond to cybersecurity threats.
What is Security Posture?
Security posture refers to the overall strength of your business’s cybersecurity readiness. It encompasses the status of your networks, hardware, services, software, and vendors. It also considers your business’s resiliency when it comes to cyber-threats.
It’s very important to review your business’s security posture because it will ultimately tell you how vulnerable your systems are to threats, and your ability to respond to them. Your organization’s security posture has an inverse relationship with cybersecurity threats, meaning that as your security posture gets stronger, your cybersecurity risk decreases.
Tips for getting started:
- One of the first things you can do is perform a security assessment: These will test and “grade” your security system, as well as tell you how prepared it is for potential threats. Specifically, cybersecurity risk assessments are key when reviewing your business’s overall security posture. These assessments help you understand exactly what data and infrastructure you have, the value of assets you need to protect, and the steps you should take to remediate any issues.
- Sign up for the Mirazon Reporting & Analytics Subscription: Having this for your business will allow you to become aware of issues/threats faster, enabling you to respond more proactively. Along with these types of notifications, you will get detailed reports which you can use over time to see trends or patterns and analyze areas of your business’s network security to look for improvements and potential threats. This helps you not only get ahead of the game, but stay ahead of the game.
- Commonly asked questions during security assessments: What type of data do we collect? Where and how are we storing the data? How do we document and safeguard the data? How long do we/should we keep the data? Who has access to the data (internally and externally)? And lastly, is the place where the data is stored properly secured?
- Have an Incident Response Plan: These are written for specific issues such as ransomware and phishing attacks, and data breaches. It’s important to note that you should prioritize this plan by business impact. This plan should also include making updates as needed and reevaluating how you automate threat detections. Lastly, this plan includes steps your business should take towards remediation.
Use these tips to get a holistic view of your business’s security posture and get ahead of potential threats. You can, and should, review them on a routine basis to reevaluate where your security posture is at, and where you’d like it to be. Just like our own posture, your business’s security posture should be straight and strong.