Cybersecurity Needs to Shift for Businesses to Survive

With some motivation from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses are adjusting their approach to cybersecurity. Typically, businesses would take a more measured approach in their day-to-day security improvements, while swiftly acting if there was any kind of clear and present danger. While this proved effective, the current situation has now shifted priorities over to maintaining resilience. Let’s examine some of these shifts, and how an advantage can be gained through a consistent cybersecurity strategy.

The Changes We’ve Witnessed

For such an… eventful… year, it started off with little anticipation of the events to come. Businesses had ample time to plan their 2020 technology budgets, but most (if not all) of these budgets were postponed (if not thrown out the proverbial window) with the spread of COVID-19.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, cybercriminals are typically quite opportunistic, and so many took advantage of the crisis at hand to strike. Exacerbating this issue even further, many businesses saw their security budgets as a candidate for budget cuts and borrowing funds. Due to these circumstances, these businesses had weakened security measures during the time that strong security would be needed the most.

However, industry analysts have found the events that have followed somewhat surprising. While security spending was cut by many, the investments that remain are still mitigating attacks. In fact, data breaches fell by a full third during the first half of 2020.

Naturally, many businesses are now wondering if the large investments they were making into their cybersecurity were actually helping them all that much.

Don’t Abandon What Works

Before we go any further, we wanted to take a moment and identify a few security investments that—despite the shifting viewpoints on cybersecurity spending—should not be sacrificed:

• Endpoint protection – There are policies that you need to have in place, like those that secure your network’s entry points, in order to keep threats out of your business network. Cybercriminals now have some very sophisticated means of gaining access, which means you need to be able to detect, identify, contain, and neutralize these attacks.
• Employee training – Nowadays, phishing attacks are one of, if not the, most popular cyberthreats out there today. If you want to keep your network and the data it stores sufficiently secure, you need to make sure your employees can both identify a phishing attempt and address it appropriately.
• Encryption for remote connections – Remote work has become a very popular option, but this makes your security as you implement such a strategy no less important. Implementing a trustworthy remote access solution or installing an enterprise VPN will help to protect your business as you continue its operations.
• Mobile access management – The smartphone is now an essential business tool, but it is used even more for personal use. Therefore, it is crucial that you have the protections in place to secure these devices.

With these technologies supporting your security, you can maintain your productivity without putting your resources and data at risk.

How to Move Forward

With so many businesses now tightening their belts and their budgets, it’s a safe bet that we’ll see emerging strategies that integrate what we have learned in the recent past with the limited finances that organizations have access to today. In short, we’ll see far more cost-efficient cybersecurity platforms coming to the fore. We’re confident that these platforms will commonly feature a few strategies:

• Building unified resilience – Which sounds easier, protecting a few disparate departments or protecting an entire business with consistent security practices? Obviously, the latter. Establishing a universal strategy can help reduce overhead spent on support as well as encourage a more continuous business.
• Improving cyber hygiene – Many organizations lack a sufficient system to properly manage the different levels of access their digital resources should require. Implementing such a system can provide operational benefits to all levels of the business that does so.
• Focusing on cooperation – While the pandemic has separated many from their coworkers, it has also demonstrated how crucial it is for departments to work together to accomplish the business’ goals. In the same vein, keeping up a standard of shared security responsibility makes it harder for bad actors to successfully strike.

One thing is abundantly clear: cybersecurity needs to be a major focus point from here on out, even more so than it was before. i-medIT can help you implement the protections you need. Reach out to our experts today by calling 630-549-6199.