Cybersecurity has become an essential part of every organization’s business processes. Many small and medium-sized businesses tend to treat cybersecurity as an add-on process instead of integrating it into everything they do.
With businesses collecting more data than ever before, the days of adopting a single cybersecurity solution and expecting it to do the job are long gone. Company networks have become so complex, and threat so advanced, that it’s best to use different tools to address different vulnerabilities.
Testing your network for resilience is more important than ever before. Here are 4 steps you should take to build a cybersecurity framework that can withstand the strongest of attacks.
Define Your Sources of Value
SMBs these days have a variety of assets. Aside from physical business assets, electronic assets such as data and infrastructure are vulnerable to attack. There are other sources of business value that you might miss, such as processes central to your bottom line.
The best way to begin is to identify these processes and then identify what goes into making them successful. For example, your primary business process might draw from various assets such as customer data, internal financial projections, and market projection data. The process might use a tool that relies on cloud storage.
As a result, you now have at least 4 assets that need security at all times. Your business probably relies on multiple processes to function smoothly. It’s best to rank these processes by criticality and devote security resources based on this list.
You’ll need to do this because when your processes come under attack, your response needs to be tailored to the risk your business faces. If multiple processes come under attack, your process criticality list will help you determine where the majority of your security response resources should be directed.
Deciding how to respond is just as important as choosing what to respond to. Your asset criticality list will help you determine your response.
Understand Your Vulnerabilities
As wonderful as it would be to believe that your network has zero vulnerabilities and that your solutions protect you all the time from all kinds of attacks, such a security posture is impossible these days. Attackers are more sophisticated than ever before, and thanks to the growing use of AI, cybersecurity is a rapidly changing field.
Companies are better off utilizing risk-specific solutions instead of one solution that covers every asset. However, the fragmented approach increases the risk of inefficient workflows. Your assets might be protected individually, but this doesn’t mean your organization is protected.
A managed SOC solution such as Cyrebro will help you integrate all of your standalone security solutions into an easy to use dashboard. Instead of checking individual configurations and their ability to talk to one another, you can view everything in a centralized hub.
Cyrebro’s Cyber Brain algorithms monitor your standalone security solutions for integration vulnerabilities and can help you interpret the consequences of events across all platforms within your organization. When allied to the central dashboard that displays all notifications and security events from every solution, Cyrebro’s SOC platform is a no-brainer for SMBs that wish to build a resilient security infrastructure.
Note that your employees’ actions are also potential vulnerabilities. Evaluate the effectiveness of your security training programs and whether they focus on enhancing awareness or whether they encourage your employees to modify their behavior.
Understand Threat Vectors
SMBs face a variety of cybersecurity threats every day. Attackers are well aware of SMB vulnerabilities. A 2020 report conducted by Bullguard indicated that 43% of SMBs had no security plan in place, let alone a resilient framework. What’s worse is that the same report found that 60% of SMBs believe they aren’t a potential target for cybercriminals.
Understanding your threat landscape is critical to developing resilience. Most businesses find this intimidating or believe that figuring this out requires significant resources. Thankfully, this isn’t the case.
Cybersecurity frameworks such as NIST and MITRE ATT&CK help small IT teams develop proper security plans depending on the size of their organizations and their lines of business. These frameworks help companies determine their needs and provide best practices to secure important assets.
While it’s important for you to devote resources towards security, you don’t need enterprise-level solutions to build robust frameworks. Use existing frameworks to identify the most potent threats you face and develop a security response plan.
Monitor Risks
Many SMBs develop frameworks only to let themselves down by failing to monitor their response plans via the right metrics. The right metric can make or break your security plan. Take care to identify the right Key Risk Indicators (KRIs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and make sure they aren’t vanity metrics.
Rely on the security frameworks mentioned in the previous section. These frameworks will help you figure out which metrics are best suited for your organization, and you can create processes to track them accordingly.
A Persistent Threat
Cyber risk is ever-present in today’s business environment, and you must create a resilient cybersecurity framework. Choosing the right solutions is just one step in the process. You need to back this up with a business-wide security framework that ties all of these tools together and helps you monitor risks.
Follow these four tips to create a resilient framework and secure your business from cyberattacks.