Cybersecurity Risk Management: 5 Essential Steps for a More Secure Organization

In the current telework environment, cybersecurity issues are on the rise. It’s just a matter of when – not if – your organization will experience a cyber-attack. And the time to have a robust cybersecurity risk management plan is now. The following five essential steps can help create a more secure, vigilant, and resilient organization.

1. Know the value of your digital assets.
   Cybercriminal goals and tools continue to rise so you need to understand your digital assets. This will help you prioritize security requirements for third parties managing your on-premises and cloud infrastructure. Include in your business continuity plan the type of investments that should be dedicated to protecting your ‘information crown jewels’ at all costs.

   Key Points

   • ‘Information crown jewels’ vary from industry to industry. These can reside on mobile or cloud-based technologies, remote workforce, partners – virtually anywhere.
   • Keep an updated list of entities that have access to critical information, digital tools, and infrastructure systems.
   • Ask existing and potential business partners for security checks and their own cybersecurity policies.
2. Always assess your cyberthreat intelligence (CTI) capability.
   Organizations must have the ability to identify, detect, and respond to cyber threats. Situational awareness, tactical/strategic responses, and synthesis of internal and external intelligence – these are integral to a CTI approach. Stakeholders must be proactively putting in place comprehensive security analytics solutions to maintain the availability, integrity, and confidentiality of all sensitive information.

   Key Points

   • Be driven in seeking new sources of information and new ways to identify trends, technologies, and tactics in cybersecurity defense.
   • Be diligent in monitoring data logs, access trails, and other related activities to detect even a subtle intrusion or a potential data hole that needs to be plugged.
   • Uncover useful intelligence and insights to develop an advanced detection capability that will help improve your overall security posture.
3. Security awareness is your constant priority.
   More than just a compliance exercise, security awareness must always be the aim of any organization operating in the digital business world. This includes finding out all risks, challenges, and threats within every department as well as upholding a security awareness culture among all on-site employees and the remote workforce.

   Key Points

   • Encourage all workers to think that cyber threats are not just an IT problem and that they should be aware of what’s at risk and how they should respond.
   • Develop training programs to explain cybersecurity rules, challenges, and activities for which all workers are responsible.
   • Security awareness must be executed in a more interactive, on-going manner to secure the organization.
4. Strengthen your cybersecurity protocols.
   Knowing the value of your digital assets is one thing; working on cybersecurity vulnerabilities is an entirely different matter – one that you should always strive to achieve. While cybercriminals are constantly targeting unknown system flaws, it doesn’t mean they are not ready to take advantage of the limitations and failings of well-known systems. Expand your scope in terms of fixing obvious security weaknesses to help move your organization in a more secure direction.

   Key Points

   • Evaluate your security risk in terms of loss, theft, or destruction of sensitive data, service disruption, and customer impacts.
   • Address potential vulnerabilities in physical security, on-premises infrastructure, and access rights regularly.
   • Avoid over-dependence on a single software services provider for patch management and cybersecurity solutions.
5. Prepare for the inevitable.
   Organizations should test their cybersecurity risk management process to prove that any damage to the system can be dealt with accordingly. Use risk simulations to provide a much needed and valuable reality check to improve the organization’s cyber resilience. A clear workflow process in the face of a cyberattack will help contain a security breach and keep business operations running as usual.

   Key Points

   • Know how departments and teams will work together during a cyberattack
   • Determine how to engage customers, partners, and regulators.
   • Test the usefulness and effectiveness of your of existing cybersecurity risk management processes through risk simulations.

Thrive Amid The Evolving Cyber Threat Landscape

Becoming a secure, vigilant, and resilient organization doesn’t happen overnight but it doesn’t have to be a grueling journey. These five essential steps for a robust cybersecurity risk management plan will help your organization thrive amid the evolving cyber threat landscape. Learn more about how ClinkIT Solutions can Secure, Optimize, and Synchronize (S.O.S.) your business cybersecurity through certified CISO services. Get started today.