How confident are you in your organization's cybersecurity system? As technology continues to grow, cyberattacks on organizations are becoming increasingly common. Typically, most organizations are equipped with the standard security framework including antivirus, firewalls, patching, and essential backups to protect their business, but more than half of the tech and security executives say they are not sure if their corporate system would be able to address the cyber risks they may face. In addition, recovery from an attack would be far worse than the attack itself and the cost of the recovery could be significant enough to hinder your growth as a company.
It is critical for leaders of organizations to examine your cybersecurity defences and decide if actions need to be taken. In this blog, you will find a few short questions for checking your organization’s cybersecurity status and recommendations for improving your cybersecurity level.
Have you also read?
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Have Cybersecurity be top of mind for everyone.
Questions for Checking Your Cybersecurity System
Let’s start with six questions to help you check your cybersecurity system quickly. If you want to assess your cybersecurity system with experts, ProServeIT provides Cybersecurity Assessment Services.
🔒 How can you move away from antivirus and move towards enhanced endpoint protection?
✉️ Have you implemented enhanced mailbox protection?
👤 Have you implemented multi-factor authentication (MFA) for logins?
🔥 Have you ensured that your firewall is a Tier 1 Firewall that is currently supported?
📱 Is patching being done, not just on your devices, but on your applications as well?
💾 Do you have independent back-ups that are separate from your main system?
If your answers don’t seem optimistic, here is the right answer on where to start to protect your organization and how you can complement your cybersecurity system.
Where to Start to Protect Your Organization
First of all, let’s check where your organization’s security level belongs, from level 1 to level 3. Our recommendation is to eventually reach level 3 for the best cybersecurity performance, keeping your organization totally safe from any cybersecurity risks.
🔥 Level 1. Typical Cybersecurity Level
Most organizations belong to this standard level, equipped with basic antivirus, non-Tier 1 Firewall, some level of patching, and some backups. Many leaders say that they are okay with their security system, which seems safe and comfortable. The reality is, however, that this kind of system used to function well in the past, like three or five years ago, but not anymore. Since there are more threats beyond the viruses, such as Ransomware or CryptoLocker, this level of cybersecurity cannot prevent cybersecurity attacks, which can cause detrimental damage to your organization.
If you also have this scenario, it is the right time to move away from level 1 and place your cybersecurity position to level 2 with an enhanced endpoint protection solution, which can protect against additional threats beyond viruses. Although viruses are still out there, they are not normal attacks anymore since there are no easy ways for criminals to monetize them. Therefore, you need a solution that will protect against encryption which is increasing rapidly with easier monetization.
🎯 Level 2. Targeted Cybersecurity Level
If your organization has enhanced endpoint protection, mailbox and identity protection, a Tier 1 Firewall in support, patching of all devices and independent back-ups, welcome aboard to level 2. This is the level organizations should aim to achieve as a new minimum cybersecurity standard. Here you can say that you have done at least what is required to protect your business.
The functions in level 2 are critical to preventing encryption in the first place. Endpoint protection is possible by patching all devices and even all applications on the devices that you're currently using. Enhanced mailbox protection scans every attachment and even links in emails and blocks mail-targeted phishing attempts. Multi-factor authentication for your identity also keeps your business safe from encryption by using a text message with a PIN or using an authenticator application. On top of that, you can utilize a tier 1 Firewall in support. We can provide security updates to minimize the cyber-attack vectors. Finally, you need to have backups which are independent. When hackers access your environment, one of the very first things they would do is to find the location of backups, contaminate them, and get ransom in return. Therefore, you need to have a backup solution that involves either having copies of the backup somewhere else or having a technical conversation with us.
✨Level 3. Ideal Cybersecurity Level
When you are getting to level three and beyond, you might be industry-centric, geography-centric or for some other reasons, you may be specifically concerned about security to take additional steps to protect your organization. This is where we look at overall security posture management programs, mobile device management, or protecting all the applications that we authenticate beyond the ones that we host like Salesforce, your FedEx, or Canada post accounts. Moreover, there are numerous other security tools that can all play a role depending on what type of threat you are trying to protect against. We cannot list them all here, but there are things that you can do to continue to enhance and augment your existing security position with our help.
To learn more from our CTO, watch this video:
Download the ‘Where to Start to Protect Your Organization’ One-Pager
Microsoft Sentinel Can Improve Your Cybersecurity Level
Microsoft Sentinel has powerful cybersecurity capabilities. If you look at any of the checkboxes for level 1 that relates to you, it would be worth having a conversation with us to move to level 2 or 3 where you put your organization in a better position and protect your business. We provide Microsoft Sentinel, a Cloud-native, security information event management (SIEM) and security orchestration automated response (SOAR) solution, which can defend the frontline of your organization’s cybersecurity.
How Microsoft Sentinel Protects Your Cybersecurity
Microsoft Sentinel is a powerful tool for your frontline defenders in your organization.
🕵 Helps you detect suspicious threats. Based on the analytics and threat intelligence capabilities of Microsoft, it can create detection rules to find any threats and anomalies within your organization.
🗂️ Investigates suspicious cases and brings found cases to you to provide full details of alerts.
💡 Easily Responds to detected incidents promptly with Microsoft Sentinel's pre-determined procedures. You can decide either to run it manually or automate the process of responding.
If you want to be confident about the cybersecurity of your organization and have peace of mind, ProServeIT’s Microsoft Sentinel could be the end-to-end solution that brings you peace. Learn more about Microsoft Sentinel here, then contact us to get started today.
