The ongoing covid-19 outbreak has been a major disruptor for businesses in 2020. Even with promising vaccines, the situation still remains grim in many countries. For businesses, the biggest concern is managing remote teams and employees, as WFH becomes the new norm. On the other hand, hackers and cybercriminals are exploiting every possible vulnerability they can find. In this quick guide, we are sharing more on how your business can manage cyber threats & risks in 2021 in a more efficient manner.
- Update everything. When manufacturers, developers, and companies come up with firmware, software, and operating system updates and security patches, that’s for a reason. Do not delay these updates as it may mean compromising with your existing resources. Hackers mostly don’t try to “hack” into systems, but rather try to find flaws and issues that can be used to their benefit.
- Review your disaster recovery plan. Having a plan and set of protocols for managing incidents is critical. As threats and risks loom large, you want to be sure that your security teams are well-versed with the steps to be taken to manage a situation, if a breach occurs. The basic steps for this could be just about taking backups regularly, network scanning and penetration testing.
- Train your employees. The importance of this step cannot be overstated. When it comes to cybersecurity, ensuring that your teams are trained on the important aspects. Cybersecurity training, in fact, should be a part of your onboarding and ongoing employee workshops.
- Reduce access rights. Just like you don’t want that one person to control your entire IT environment, it is important to be sure that not many people have access to your systems, devices, and networks. There are some nice access right management suites, and these are pretty useful and scalable.
- Password protection is a must. This is as simple as it can get – Protect your passwords. Ensure that employees change default passcodes and passwords, and they should use a password manager. Another good step is to just avoid using easy passwords. A good password is at least 12 characters long and has special characters and numbers.
Final word
You have to consider ways and means to mitigate your risks to enhance cybersecurity, but there is no direct or assured way of being entirely immune to cyberattacks. Allow your employees to be responsible and handle IT resources as usual, but retain the controls.
