4 ways to reduce your Cybersecurity risk
Do you have these systems in place?
Hi everyone,
Hope you all had a good long weekend and thanks to all of you who took the time to respond to my email last month about ‘clean-desk’ security – I’d recommend providing something similar for your staff to get the message out there!
Continuing with the security message – last week saw two major cyber incidents. One on the Nine Network which prevented live TV broadcast and another on the Federal Parliament cutting access to email.
Both of these organisations have huge budgets dedicated to preventing this type of attack, and yet over and over we still keep seeing them happen. There are two primary causes – unpatched security vulnerabilities, and the human factor. Addressing the first is comparatively easy – make sure your systems are kept up to date – for smaller businesses this is much easier! The second is much more difficult as it involves every person in your company being aware of good security practices, and making the right decisions every day.
These are the bare minimums we would recommend for a passable level of security:
- Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) on all cloud-based or internet accessible systems.
- Empower your staff with security awareness training.
- Have centrally managed operating system and application patching.
- Ensure your backup systems are logically separated from live systems (this means you can’t access the backups directly from the production network) – yes, you need backups of cloud-based systems as well!
If you’ve got these four systems in place and working properly, your risk of a breach is substantially reduced, and should the worst happen, minimise downtime and potential data loss. If you do not have these or do not know if you do, it should be your highest priority.
Please reach out to me so we can discuss what it will take for you to reduce your risk from a Cybersecurity breach. The first 3 clients who sign up during April will receive 10% off the lifetime cost of your cloud backup subscription.
Of course, there is much more to IT security than just the above – and for those of you with a managed services contract with us, these are always included in your monthly reports.
Thanks for reading
About the author
Eden has over a decade of experience in the IT industry. Working with numerous organisations from a diverse range of industries; education, finance and renewable energy to name a few.
Prior to joining Intuitive IT Eden worked at a top tier Managed Services provider which gave him valuable experience in a wide array of enterprise level technologies and customer environments.