Being proactive means anticipating future problems, changes, or needs and taking action properly; when it comes to cybersecurity, proactive means the same.
Generally, proactive cybersecurity is everything you do before attacks take place. Often, businesses don’t prepare themselves for possible cyber threats until it’s too late. Compared to responding to cyber attacks after they occur, a proactive cybersecurity strategy focuses on preventing threats in the first place.
Proactive cybersecurity also entails all the activities and processes carried out regularly within an organization to avoid risks. Some proactive cybersecurity practices may include identifying and fixing vulnerabilities in the network infrastructure, preventing security and data breaches, and regularly evaluating your security posture’s strength.
If you want to implement a proactive cybersecurity strategy in your business, here are some of the elements you might want to consider:
- Penetration Testing
Penetration testing cost is worth it once you include it in your proactive cybersecurity strategy. Sometimes known as ethical hacking or pen testing, penetration testing assesses your computer system’s apps for susceptibility to threats and vulnerabilities. Some examples of vulnerabilities are design flaws, configuration errors, and software bugs.
Penetration testing is also referred to as white hat attacks since it involves an authorized party’s attempt to break into your company’s system. It’s an excellent preventative security measure and offers several benefits, such as:
- Risk Identification: Penetration testing provides insights into which systems or apps are at risk, what kinds of tools you must invest in, and what protocols to follow. This process may also uncover major system weaknesses and possible cyber attacks you might not have thought about.
- Provide Solutions: Penetration testing offers solutions that help companies not only detect and prevent attackers. Such solutions can also expel intruders from their system efficiently.
Aside from the above benefits, penetration testing can help determine your system’s strengths. With this information, you can focus on the things that will boost your company’s security posture.
- External Cybersecurity Agency
Another element of a proactive cybersecurity strategy is an external cybersecurity agency like a reliable managed cyber security company. Cybercriminals are becoming more sophisticated in their attacks and target businesses of any size. If you want to protect your business, you can proactively secure it by working with external cybersecurity agencies.
These agencies offer vulnerability assessments of your system’s weaknesses and recommend the best possible security measures to improve your company’s systems. Typically, they have a team of cybersecurity specialists or ethical hackers who run tests to know how vulnerable your company is to attack and what proactive measures you should take to prevent cyber threats.
- Incident Response Plan
An effective incident response plan is key to your proactive cybersecurity strategy. With this, you can guarantee you’re ready when attacks occur. When creating one for your company, make sure it includes the following:
- Decision-Making Process: It’ll help determine who will decide where to direct the essential resources during a security breach.
- Communication Strategy: It provides details on what information to expect and updates to provide to stakeholders and employees.
- Notification Protocol: It helps determine when and who needs to know about the breach. It may also include law enforcement authorities when required by your local laws.
Once you’re done with your incident response plan, it must be tested and updated regularly with the input of every stakeholder in your company. It must also be a part of your business continuity and disaster recovery plan.
- Adopt A Comprehensive Cybersecurity Awareness Training Program
Cybersecurity awareness training is an essential part of your proactive cybersecurity strategy. Besides, regardless of how advanced your tools are, they’re useless if your employees don’t know about them. So, if you want to mitigate cyber attacks, your company must adopt a comprehensive cybersecurity awareness training program.
Training can be a technical approach to educate your employees and be more aware of the importance of data security and privacy. When done effectively, well-trained employees pose less risk to your company. Fewer risks mean lower financial losses from cyber crimes.
In addition, if all employees get cybersecurity awareness training, you can prevent lapses in protection. In short, you’ll minimize the odds of security breaches because your employees know the proper steps to keep your company data secure and safe.
Companies with security-aware staff also have a better reputation in the market since most consumers are reluctant to do transactions with untrustworthy organizations. Businesses that are repeatedly subject to cyber attacks often suffer from negative publicity. So, to protect your business reputation and its valuable assets and data, invest in a cybersecurity training program for your employees.
- Threat Hunting
The primary goal of threat hunting is to discover unknown threats lurking within your company’s systems. It uses threat intelligence and indicators as a hypothesis or starting point for a hunt.
Unlike other reactive methods, threat hunting is a proactive approach to uncovering existing, unknown, and unpatched threats within your company. When done successfully, it may even identify more advanced threats that may put your business at risk.
- Zero-Trust Approach
You should never forget to include a zero-trust approach in your proactive cybersecurity strategy. It strives to authorize and verify each app, device, and user attempting to access all resources.
Following a zero-trust approach gives you more control and visibility over your company’s traffic and users. It also securely connects devices, apps, and users using business policies over different networks, which may be handy to remote workers.
- Regular Data Backup
One of the proactive steps and ways to protect your business from cyber threats is to perform regular data backup. If you have a data backup, you can easily restore any data damaged or lost during a breach. With this, you can return to regular operations, minimizing downtime consequences.
You can store your backup on an external hard drive or online. If you’re worried about losing your backup, you may invest in a cloud-based backup service to access your data whenever or wherever you want.
Conclusion
Proactive cybersecurity is a broad approach. It involves a mindset of offensive cybersecurity and specific practices and methods. So, instead of waiting for an attack to happen, it’s better to act now to prevent possible cyber threats or attacks from happening.
Also Read: 6 Important Cybersecurity Tips For Software Developers
