Your environment needs significant improvements to become more IT resilient and reduce the risk to your business. This means that, with your infrastructure in its current state, there is a high likelihood that your organization will not be able to detect, prevent, and respond effectively to an event and that will lead to significant business disruption. Further, your environment can benefit from process improvements in terms of your capability to manage, mitigate, and recover from a disruption.
To increase the IT resilience of your organization, consider:
- Block high-risk email attachments and links. Phishing attacks may embed a link in an email that redirects your employee to an unsecure website that requests sensitive information or they may install a Trojan via a malicious email attachment or ad which will allow the intruder to exploit loopholes and obtain sensitive information.
- Deploy an application whitelisting solution. This will help you control the software that is allowed to run on your computer systems by denying access to any application that has not been specifically whitelisted, i.e. deemed safe and allowed by the administrator.
- Deploy a proven business continuity system. These systems are sophisticated, yet easy to use and their importance in setting the foundation for IT resilience in undeniable. You need to understand where your data is stored and that it is accessible regardless of your location. Cloud storage systems allow you to create and access data across multiple devices, but this also adds to the complexity of your systems. Another important factor is scalability. The volume of data, in every business is exploding which makes it even more likely that important data will be lost simply because there is more of it to lose. Arguably the most important characteristic of business continuity is recovery, not just for your data, but your applications and systems too. Fast, simple, and complete recovery you should allow you to restore everything from a single file to your entire infrastructure. This is what it means to be IT resilient.
- Use a strong antivirus solution to detect viruses, spyware and other suspicious files such as keyloggers used by hackers. They will also alert you, and proceed to block them from entering your computer system. Many antivirus solutions can identify and eliminate the specific areas of data affected by malware without damaging your original data and many can disable the viruses and drastically reduce the amount of unsolicited emails you receive.
- Sufficiently train your workforce for the dangers of cyber crime that targets businesses. This means that most companies are left at great risk and the best way to mitigate the risk is to ensure all staff receive thorough security awareness training. This will save your company time and money by preventing security breaches that were caused by users who were not aware of the damage they could cause by inadvertently responding to phishing attacks.
- Conduct regular vulnerability assessments to help identify and quantify the security vulnerabilities in your organization’s environment. Conducting regular vulnerability assessments helps to provide your organization with the knowledge, awareness, and risk background necessary to understand threats to your environment so you can react accordingly.
