Top 5 First Steps to Secure Your Organization

Organizations tend to grant the responsibilities associated with cybersecurity and information security to persons that lack the proper background. Professionals in finance, operations, and risk are versatile; however, security programs require efficient applications. Organizations must consider ongoing threats involving incident response, recovery, reputational damage, and revenue loss that can be detrimental to your business.

Small organizations must begin building, managing, and maturing their security programs to ensure their organization is protected from cyber threats. Hiring a full-time security officer can be especially challenging, but there are immediate actions your organization can take to control the responsibilities surrounding your cybersecurity and information security operations. Here we break down the top five steps your organization can start working on to bolster your program.

Top 5 Steps to Begin Solidifying Your Cybersecurity Program

1. Getting ownership of the information security program is the first area of focus. Your organization should designate a qualified individual to oversee its information security program.
2. Begin to solidify and produce some stability in your program and understand where all your assets are located and their patching and vulnerability status.
3. Now that you know where your assets are, the focus should shift to your data, especially any sensitive data. Protections include data backup while ensuring the data can be restored. It is vital to test your ability to restore your data backups regularly.
4. Enable multifactor authentication (MFA) for your environment and any systems that have sensitive or customer information. As you work towards enabling MFA for everything in your network, most organizations start with VPN access, administrator level users, email, applications that can enable MFA, and ultimately all users logging into any of your systems.
5. Lastly, the information security owner or officer should work on getting visibility across your systems, applications, and network. While attaining activity reports, status reports, or alerts is a start, getting visibility and taking action on these activities is essential to keeping your organization, its users, and data safe.

These five activities are immediate actions your organization can take to begin securing your cybersecurity program. However, there are many more elements that need attention to continue to enhance your operations.

At Wolf & Company our Virtual Chief Information Security Officers (vCISOs) specialize in building, maintaining, and maturing information and cybersecurity programs. Our vCISO team has visibility across several industries such as financial institutions, healthcare and healthcare tech, manufacturing, distribution, and retail and software as a service (SAAS). Wolf can assist your organization in understanding its cyber and information security needs and build the programs and structure to ensure you are not at risk.