Business

How To Evaluate The Safety Of Your Business

Any business with a hunger for success must also hunger for safety. Any company can become vulnerable, whether big or small, and the outcome of a cyber attack can be devastating if it is successful. A study showed that businesses of all sides suffer an average of $200,000 loss on cyberattacks annually, and more than 50% of these businesses never recover!

In essence, evaluating the safety of your business from time to time should be standard practice for every business owner. These will help you uncover potential system risks and take timely actions to minimize the effect or eradicate the issues.

Cyber security risk analysis helps organizations understand, control, and address issues on cyber security on time within an organization before it worsens and causes significant problems for business operations. Analyzing or assessing risks isn’t something new, especially if you are in the information security industry. It means you are in the risk management business and must take cyber risk evaluation very seriously.

What is Cyber Risk?

Cyber risk is the possibility of being prone to harmful disruptions over sensitive data, business operations online, or finances. They are primarily linked with occurrences that could result in data breaches.

Cyber risks are alternatively known as security threats. And some valid examples include data leaks, ransomware, phishing, malware insider attacks, etc. There are different risks posed to a business, and it is essential to take practical measures to combat and reduce cybersecurity risks.

Some practical approaches to reducing your cyber risks include stiffening areas that could be easily exploited on the network. Though it is commonly used in place of vulnerabilities. However, they are not precisely the same. There are three main categories of cyber risks, and they include:

  • What is a threat?
  • How vulnerable is the system?
  • What is the implication of a potential breach financially and reputationally if it occurs?

Cyber Risk Assessment Defined

According to NIST, Cyber risk assessments are used to identify, estimate, and prioritize risks to organization assets, other enterprises, individuals, the state, an offshoot of the processes, and the deployment of information systems.

The main essence of cyber risk assessment is to provide regular information and support to stakeholders and identify risks. They also deliver an executive summary to enable directors and business executives to take informed steps about their security posture.

Cyber risk assessment is a proactive assessment focusing on identifying and detecting or recognizing systems, devices, software, network, physical, and other vulnerabilities and threats.

Understanding your business’s safety protocols will help you respond to risks and manage them. The complete aspects of cybersecurity assessments will depend on your industry, business size, risk limits, budget, and timeline.

However, if your business faces any of these signs, then it is time to evaluate risks or schedule a cyber security assessment as urgent as possible:

  • Your instinct tells you something is wrong.
  • Your employees are not tech-savvy.
  • You have aggrieved former employees.
  • Your company doesn’t have a viable data policy in place.
  • Your company uses old technology.
  • You have more remote employees using their own devices.

How to Evaluate Business Safety

To evaluate your business’s safety, you must critically examine some of these fundamental indicators. Then, business executives can figure out weaknesses within their systems and address them before internet bad actors exploit them.

1. Data Backups

One of the foremost factors determining your business’s safety is how data is backed up regularly. You’ll need to create storage systems for these backups outside offsite. You should consider cloud-based storage for enhanced security and redundancy, and it should not be accessible from within the company’s network.

2. Employee Awareness and Dedication

How informed are your employees as regards security and risk management? Knowing who is responsible for handling the security risks of your company. You’ll need continuous risk management and reporting by assigned personnel. If not, your business can be exposed to attacks.

3. Check Your Patching Frequency

Checking patching frequency is another way to determine the level of data exposure. How often are software updates happening on storage, servers, workstations, and across other devices? If your IT infrastructure is not regularly updated, your security system is probably highly porous. You should consider installing Windows security patches, Database patches, and antivirus patches, among others, every quarter. And it is best to automate everything.

4. Data Access Control

What policy on data access control do you have in place in your organization? There should be a data access control policy that will determine who has access to what. These access control system types are set apart by how users are assigned permissions: Mandatory access control (MAC), Discretionary access control (DAC), and Role-based access control.

The mandatory access control uses a central authority to assign employee rights to data. Access is classified based on access requirements and risk level. Resources are used depending on the level of privileges users have. Role-based access control focuses on the roles and needs of each player in the organization to offer data access. With discretionary access control, the data owner decides who should be given access to data by setting DAC policies. The model hands out complete control to the data owner to determine the level of restriction placed on files.

5. Data Trustworthiness

The trustworthiness of data plays a vital role in the safety evaluation of your business. It determines where your business security posture stands. Placing ultimate priority on data credibility is an assurance that a company has a strategy to ensure safe and uncompromised data resources.

6. Employee Security Posture

The employee security posture means you must determine an employee’s effective security posture. Do users take the security of their data seriously? If they do not, then their data security will be poor. Those who utilize tools and data must understand what it means and have proper measures to determine security posture.

7. Digital Identity Management

Digital identity management basically relates to how customers’ personal information is collected, stored, processed, and accessed securely. With data and applications located in diverse areas, the traditional perimeter of networks and firewalls has become a sieve due to the dispersed locations of data and applications. As a result, you’ll need to manage digital identities to control data and application access. Your security posture is questionable if your digital identity posture is porous.

8. Culture of Risk

How truthful and open are the company employees? A well-developed culture of risk indicates the company has a good business security posture and encourages workers to be honest with risk situations and also align the threats to strategic enterprise objectives. Without a strong culture of risk, decisions will interfere with a company’s strategic, tactical, and operational goals.

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