What does your company need to hit IT out of the ballpark for your cybersecurity needs? Improving your cybersecurity requires hiring competent IT professionals well versed in providing cybersecurity services.
Using these cybersecurity business practices and guidelines can make your business a “highly effective company” for circling the wagons and protecting assets and operations.
Here are the seven golden rules to excellence in cybersecurity:
1. Create a Strong Cybersecurity Culture
A big part of this overall goal is training. That means having social media policies and more codified in your employee handbook. It can also mean having the right video training resources or other training processes to make sure people understand how to avoid spear-phishing threats and all kinds of other cyberattacks.
The more training employees have, as experts have found out, the better the core business systems are protected from outside attackers.
2. Be Realistic About Cybersecurity Goals
Another way to show excellence in cybersecurity is to match the solution to the problem. Don’t just do the minimum and hide heads in the sand, hoping that the cybersecurity threat will go away. Proactive work that’s based on a reasonable understanding of the security environment often succeeds!
3. Eliminate Link Clicking
In that first tip, we talked about employee awareness. Everyone who uses a company network, from the CEO to a contracted person, must understand that you shouldn’t open sketchy links. That’s a major way for black hats to introduce Trojans that can destroy your network, even if you have strong firewalls in place.
It’s also good to limit the number of open USB ports in hardware to minimize the chance of a disgruntled employee just plugging in and stealing data.
speak with one of our IT specialists today4. Use Good Password Hygiene
Another major principle of cybersecurity is to have good password management. According to the most modern security analysis, this does not mean making people type in exclamation points and capitals and lowercase letters.
Instead, it means having strong passwords that people can remember, so they don’t inundate the system with password resets. It means educating the workforce and when everyone is working together, they can often “harden” IT systems pretty well.
5. Keep All Devices and Software Updated
When you hear about new viruses or worms or cyber-threats, there is often a commonality—they attacked vulnerabilities that stemmed from obsolete software versions. That means to the extent a company can keep software updated, they can avoid viruses and other kinds of malware.
6. Be Cautious With Email
It’s not just spearphishing–email can also be a weak point if scammers and hackers can impersonate others and get in a particular employee’s good graces that way. Good email handling is another part of the cybersecurity hygiene that protects your company.
7. Utilize Outside Talent with Cybersecurity Services
This one may be the lodestar of this entire set of cybersecurity best practices. We don’t know what we don’t know, and having outside assistance can really help companies to bulk up cybersecurity and deter hackers.
Having a specialized and established company help with thought leadership and guidance can make all the difference. Schedule a free consultation with TrinWare to receive a cybersecurity analysis that will help you find a good starting point for improving security in your business operations.