Cyber security gaps and data breaches account for more than 155.8 million exposed records in the United States every year.
With businesses being the most targeted, the need to safeguard organizations against impending cyber threats is essential.
To help fortify your business against damaging security threats it helps to understand common cyber security gaps, problems and solutions and how they can mitigate security risks business-wide by preventing cyber incidents from hindering growth.
To help you gain a deeper understanding of cyber security, understanding gaps, problems and solutions that commonly arise, our article covers the top ten cyber security gaps you need to know.
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1. Risk Management and Governance
Cyber security and security management should include executive leadership.
Consider appointing a Chief Security Officer (CISO) or Chief Technology Officer to improve your organization’s infrastructure and security measures against cyber threats from the top down.
With added input from across the firm, better governance policies and cybersecurity practices can be implemented to transition from reactionary to proactive.
2. IT Asset Management
Understanding your IT systems and the data they hold is proven to improve network security.
By keeping a running inventory of technology assets, you can begin to identify which devices may be causing vulnerabilities in network security.
This includes assets such as:
- Technology Infrastructure and Software
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- Workstations
- Servers
- Printers
- Applications
- Mobile Devices
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- Phones
- Tablets
- Laptops
- Internet of Things (IoT) Systems
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- Call equipment
- Wireless speak systems
With a comprehensive security gap analysis, organizations can identify devices that may be causing gaps in network security. As organizations continue to grow, annual IT inventory reports and routine risk assessments will help you close gaps in cyber security, insurance, compliance and more.
3. Social Engineering & User Training
Social engineering education and ethical hacking (or pentesting), help to prevent information like credentials, corporate financial information and personal information from being stolen and is becoming increasingly more important as remote work levels remain high following the pandemic.
By identifying and remediating hidden vulnerabilities in your organization’s security and educating employees regarding important security measures you can help prevent potentially damaging breaches from occurring.
4. Patch Management
Patch management is of growing concern amongst investor due diligence questionnaires (DDQs) as an organization’s ability to remain up-to-date with industry-standard software and systems upgrades are essential to maintaining business processes and continuity.
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5. Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
To overhaul cyber security, understanding gaps, problems and solutions and how they impact your organization’s security, you must take the time to protect every device and application connected across your organization.
While strong passwords were once strong enough to keep some hackers at bay, advancements in technology and hacker strategies have shown that single authentication factors like security questions (knowledge-based), RSA tokens (possession-based) and biometric scans (inherence-based) aren’t always strong enough.
To better protect your organization, ensure multi-factor authentication is enabled across all devices and applications that support it, this includes devices that connect to platforms such as:
- Cloud platforms
- Social media sites
- Web-based applications
- Remote access gateways
6. Strategizing Business Continuity
Many businesses fall short on their business continuity strategy, despite its importance.
With average downtime costing businesses around $5,600 per minute, every minute of downtime can result in lost consumer confidence and thousands of lost revenue (Gartner, 2014). If any of the following below is true, it’s time to take a risk assessment and improve your organization’s business continuity planning:
- The business continuity plan (BCP) has not been updated within a year
- Employees have not been properly trained on the BCP
- No recovery plan or business continuity plan is established
- BCP lacks risk-based approaches with specific risk scenarios unique to the business
7. Incident Response Planning and Protocols
It’s impossible to completely insulate your business from security risks and while many firms are supposed to possess incident response procedures, many do not.
All the same, planning and remediation following an incident should always be managed from the top down. From there, depending upon the severity of the incident, your CISO and security team may opt to escalate the incident plan while focusing on mitigating the impacts.
8. Lack of Vulnerability Assessments and Penetration Tests
Organizations can improve their security posture and better protect confidential information against cyber attacks with vulnerability assessment and penetration tests. Identifying then remediating threats is the first step to constructing the defenses necessary to mitigate damage should a breach occur.
9. User Provisioning and Management
Ensuring only the right employees can access data and sensitive information with detailed access control is critical to preventing incidental or malicious cyber threats. To improve your organization’s access controls, consider outsourcing to an MSP to implement self-service provisioning software.
10. Inconsistent Third-Party Vendor Management
Managing vendor risk and technology is a full-time job that demands a deep understanding of your organization’s demands and industry.
From managing compliance regulations to avoiding hefty fines to safeguarding sensitive information from emerging threats with improved technology and business processes, it’s important to remember your organization’s security is only as good as your security team.
Close Cyber Security Gaps with Improved Security Controls
Managing cyber security gaps boils down to identifying what gaps in understanding cyber security exist and what can be done to address these gaps.
In order to stop attacks before they can impact your business, proactive cyber security management and measures need to be deployed.
At Executech, we harness more than 20 years of experience and are trusted by 869 companies across the United States for all things IT.
With an average ticket response time of 15 minutes, your organization can finally take a business-first approach to IT. Swiftly overcome complex cyber incidents with remote or on-site support to maximize uptime while minimizing cyber security gaps with an industry-tested cyber security team in your corner.
To mitigate your cyber security gaps, connect with one of our IT specialists today.
To learn more about protecting you and your business from cybersecurity threats, check out our Ultimate Guide To Cybersecurity!
