Cybersecurity Best Practices May Involve Partnering With 3rd-Party Pros
Maintain cybersecurity best practices is essential, however, what do you do if your business doesn’t have the bandwidth or capabilities of addressing these guidelines on its own?
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Maintaining cybersecurity best practices is essential for individuals, businesses and especially the security and life-safety industries, including central station monitoring centers. Many consumers and even business owners tend to be conflicted on what’s necessary to provide adequate protection against threats and attacks, including proper management of internal and external networks.
The selection and management of cybersecurity platforms, policies and best practices is of paramount importance that requires the relentless laser focus of competent professionals. Although focusing on your own network security is one element, making sure and mandating what outside vendors and networks you and your company connect into or that connect into you is equally — and arguably more — important. Requesting certifications and details on what your vendors and clients have in place for security and protection is an acceptable business practice, and this must be updated on a frequent basis.
Most organizations take a responsible approach by partnering with creditable, certified and compliant cybersecurity professional organizations. It is a difficult balance for most businesses with limited resources to navigate the requirements, annual budgets and champions of maintaining strong and effective cybersecurity. Although this may be challenging, it’s not a viable excuse to ignore this increasingly essential service. Choosing a partner that will provide maximum value and peace of mind will pay dividends over the years and bring comfort to clients.
Although monitoring and protecting from cyber threats toward the fundamental reason of staying secure and operational is the basis, many organizations are required to maintain compliance with certain standards based on their industry or client requirements. Third-party organizations provide oversight, assessments and guidance for compliance services that help businesses identify security weaknesses. Staying ahead by leveraging platforms for penetration testing on a constant and repetitive basis is crucial.
As an agent for virtually all major cybersecurity players, I get to see the results of subscribing to these valuable services firsthand. It’s amazing that no matter how secure a client believes their organization is, it seems vulnerabilities are always uncovered. The bad actors get better at their jobs every day.
Maintaining a strong Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery playbook is vital. Frequent and tested backups of clients’ entire business infrastructure are a key first step. You need the structure and ability to easily deploy a disaster recovery plan that speedily considers your complete network with remotely configured and managed firewall. If disaster strikes, you want the ability to recover your data, servers, desktops, and the entire infrastructure to a virtual environment in seconds. This would initially be through accessing your virtualized mirrored environment while your local environment is getting restored.
Many Companies Can’t Capably Maintain Own Cyber Practices
Most organizations can’t justify or even afford to implement and maintain their own SOC (security operations center). Regardless of any company’s size, cyber criminals are counting on organizations to not have the resources to properly protect themselves or the presence of mind to make security a top priority. That’s why outsourcing to a reputable organization can be seen as a cybersecurity best practice. These relationships provide the much-needed SOC services to detect attacks and mitigate risks all without a substantial investment in people, hardware, or applications.
Partnering with an experienced and dedicated SOC and monitoring team that provide an arsenal of security technologies and assessments for large enterprises, small and medium businesses, government agencies, and financial institutions is what most organizations need.
Engaging the proper SOC services is not limited to monitoring and protecting in-office technology, networks and people. Remote working employees are included with the SOC monitoring. This allows you to have the same onsite security regardless of where your employees are physically located.
A tremendous amount of damage takes place from vulnerabilities or lack of sticking to best practices. The pros like to call it Exploitation of Trust (EoT) — although technology is essential, technology will not be enough if an organization doesn’t maintain tight policies and procedures. In addition to the firewalls, virus protection and other solutions to protect valuable data and systems, only maintaining continuous and multiple clean backups will allow you some peace of mind and confidence.
With the reality that most organizations cannot justify what is required to maintain their security in-house, cybersecurity as a service (CaaS) is effective and widely adopted —even some companies that have the capacity to tackle it in-house have decided to partner with a third party. If you go that route, just make absolutely sure you select the right partner for this particularly pertinent job.
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About the Author
Peter Giacalone
Peter Giacalone is President of Giacalone Associates, an independent security consulting firm.
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