Cyber Security Is a Business Essential For All Companies

Whatever the size of your company or the market that it trades in, the days of thinking “it will never happen to us” when it comes to cyber security and hacking attacks is well and truly over. Recent headlines have demonstrated that automated hacking tools can strike any business, anywhere, any place and at any time.

Creating the best defence for your company

The only defence against these threats is an up to date IT security strategy, with the full suite of tools in place, that are updated daily. For smaller or mid-sized businesses, your IT team might not have the time to effectively manage a firewall, backup archive, threat defence suite, or even understand in depth how they function. That’s why, increasingly, businesses of all sizes are outsourcing their security and IT services.

With a full suite of remotely managed internet security services and solutions, your business can be better prepared to deal with the threats that could strike a business at any time. Protected by up to date firewalls, intrusion testing and malware protection, hacking efforts are less likely to breach your systems.

Every business is a target

These threats mostly come from automated attacks that assault millions of IP addresses. They target known server, operating system or application weaknesses to break into a computer. From there, one popular tactic is to encrypt your data and hold it for digital ransom. They can also steal data outright and resell it online, or search for bank account or passwords and commit theft and other crimes using those details.

These robotic attacks don’t care who you are or what your business does, they are only concerned about finding a weakness and exploiting it. The only good news is that the ransom demands are usually for small amounts (not that you should ever pay), while white hat hackers can quickly find a way to unlock the kidnapped data at no cost.

However, these tactics won’t last for long, and more aggressive efforts will be the norm in the coming years. That’s as cyber terrorists look to unleash havoc online, or state actors try to bring down companies that may compete with their own.

Defending your business

While having adequate protection and the skills on hand to maintain them helps keep the computers up and running, there is more to any protection strategy. You also need to make your workers aware of the threats through training and education, so they can understand what a phishing email looks like, or why they can’t bring in a home laptop and just connect it to the office network. They should also be taught through education or access limitations what types of website they can and cannot visit during their work.

Alongside the protection systems, your business needs to ensure that data is backed up, either locally or to the cloud, allowing for business continuation should the worst happen. Disaster planning and recovery is a key element of any IT plan, catering for not just hacks, but physical disasters such as floods or fires, even devastating weather that could prevent people coming to work.

A remote working policy is operated by growing numbers of businesses, as data becomes accessible over the cloud, and collaboration tools allow people to communicate wherever they are, and work on documents or projects as if they were in the same room. This type of flexibility can help any business overcome a show-stopping or office-closing issue, but also means your business needs to be protected against every type of threat.

The zero-day threat means no one is immune

With most operating systems, firewalls and virus software updated daily as threats emerge, there is still the risk of a zero-day threat. That’s one that has not been patched and only just discovered. If there is ever a major wave of hack attacks using one of these, then no one will be immune, which is why adequate backups, the ability to access data from other systems and for employees to work flexibly are all a critical part of any company’s IT plans.

By setting these in place, your business is best prepared to defend against most attacks, and to keep on going should one get through your defences. But, by relying on poor or minimal defences, you are simply waiting for the inevitable to happen.