Cybercrime is one of the fastest-growing threats worldwide, impacting businesses across all industries. Cybersecurity Ventures estimates that by 2024, cybercrime will cause $9.5 trillion in damages globally. If cybercrime were a country, it would rank as the third-largest economy, after the U.S. and China[1].
Staying informed about the latest cybersecurity tips and best practices is essential to avoid becoming the next headline due to a security breach. Protecting your business from cyberattacks is no small feat, given that cybercriminals are always evolving their attack strategies.
Let’s discover the ten essential cybersecurity best practices to help you stay current and build a strong defense against potential threats.
Understanding Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity involves protecting computer systems, networks, and sensitive data from cyberattacks that aim to steal, alter, or destroy critical information. Whether it’s financial records, medical data, or trade secrets, businesses and organizations must build resilient defenses to counter the increasing threat of cybercrime.
Hackers often exploit vulnerabilities in software or hardware, leading to data breaches and fraud. As the number of connected devices grows, so does the need for more advanced cybersecurity measures.
Both private and public sectors face similar challenges in safeguarding critical data. With various endpoints being a part of daily work operations, more enhanced endpoint security is imperative for protecting valuable information and maintaining system integrity. Effective measures must be implemented to ensure that all endpoints are secured against potential vulnerabilities, creating a protected digital ecosystem.
Essential Cybersecurity Best Practices for Businesses in 2024
To strengthen your organization’s security posture, we’ve curated the following ten essential cybersecurity tips tailored for security professionals:
1. Establish a Robust Cybersecurity Policy
A robust cybersecurity policy ensures that all security measures within your organization are clearly defined and consistently followed. It should outline the key controls, software updates, data backup protocols, and password policies while addressing department-specific needs.
A well-structured policy must also define who maintains it, who responds to incidents, and who has admin rights, ensuring effective cybersecurity management.
2. Control Access to Sensitive Data
Controlling access to sensitive data involves limiting employee privileges to only what is necessary for their tasks. By applying the principle of least privilege and the zero trust model, your organization reduces the risk of insider threats.
Implementing just-in-time access enhances security by granting temporary access only when needed. This minimizes employee’s exposure to sensitive information. You can further enforce role-based access control, ensuring that users get permission-based access to their job role in the organization.
3. Vulnerability Management
Vulnerability management is an essential cybersecurity practice focused on the cyclical practice of identifying, classifying, prioritizing, remediating, and mitigating software vulnerabilities. It protects sensitive data and ensures compliance with industry standards. By regularly identifying vulnerabilities and prioritizing remediation efforts, organizations take informed actions to reduce the risk of cyberattacks.
With vulnerability management as a core component of the cybersecurity framework, organizations can stay ahead of emerging threats, reduce their risk exposure, and strengthen their overall security posture.
4. Maintaining a Secured Software and Hardware Environment
Organizations must maintain an optimized and secure environment for the software and hardware supporting their devices. Regular updates to both are essential: software updates bring new features, fix bugs, and strengthen security, while hardware updates enable quick responses to cybersecurity threats.
Similarly, to maintain endpoint and data security, organizations need control over device connections. Establishing input and output (I/O) device access control helps protect sensitive data by blocking unauthorized peripherals and ensuring compliance with security policies.
5. Enhance Data Protection and Management
An organization’s data protection and security is dependent on how it manages its business data and endpoints. You must build your data protection measures around the key principles of information security:
- Confidentiality — protect information from unauthorized access
- Integrity — make sure unauthorized users can’t modify data at any stage of the data lifecycle
- Availability — ensure authorized users always have access to the data they need
Consider establishing a secure VPN connection to prevent network breaches. A VPN creates a secure link that protects sensitive information from interception and enhances privacy by masking your IP address, ensuring confidentiality and reducing the risk of targeted attacks. With endpoint security solutions like Veltar, you can effectively route traffic for your on-premise assets through a secure VPN tunnel. This controlled VPN network encrypts data and enables anonymous data transmission over public networks.
You must also consider adopting a strong mobile device management solution for data protection. MDM solutions provide various data security features such as data encryption, containerization, remote lock, and wipe. This ensures that your data is protected from unauthorized access.
6. Adopt Zero-Trust Security Principles
“Zero Trust” refers to the practice of always authenticating and authorizing users based on all available data, such as user identification, location, device health, service or workload, data classification, and anomalies. Zero-trust principles—never trust, always verify, assume breach, and apply least-privileged access—ensure robust security by continuously validating users before granting access to company resources.
Implementing Single Sign-On (SSO) within a Zero Trust framework enhances secure access management by providing users with a personalized single-login experience, which reduces password fatigue and streamlines the authentication process.
Another major component of Zero Trust Security is MFA, which adds an extra layer of protection through various authentication methods, such as passwords, PINs, biometric scans, and hardware tokens. This layered approach is critical in work environments where sensitive data and critical systems are vulnerable to sophisticated attacks, as it acts as a deterrent against unauthorized access.
By leveraging least-privilege principles alongside SSO and MFA, organizations can limit permissions, regularly audit access, and reduce unnecessary standing privileges to critical data and systems. This comprehensive strategy minimizes the risk of unauthorized access and potential breaches, enhancing overall cybersecurity.
7. Conduct Regular Cybersecurity Audits
Conducting regular cybersecurity audits helps identify vulnerabilities, compliance gaps, and suspicious activities by employees, privileged users, or third-party vendors—a thorough audit, utilizing data from logs, session records, and metadata.
Cybersecurity audits enhance security by detecting breaches and improving accountability. This proactive approach allows you to adjust and strengthen your organization’s cybersecurity posture effectively.
8. Prepare an Incident Response Plan
A well-prepared Incident Response Plan enables organizations to respond quickly to cybersecurity threats, minimizing damage and operational disruption. It establishes clear roles and responsibilities for IT teams, incident responders, and management, ensuring a coordinated and efficient response.
By having a structured approach, organizations can effectively contain attacks, identify sources, and remediate issues, reducing the potential for data loss and financial impact. A good plan also helps maintain regulatory compliance, avoiding penalties for non-reporting.
Regular testing and updating of the plan are essential to ensure its effectiveness. The continuous improvement process allows organizations to identify gaps and refine their incident response strategy. This strengthens their overall cybersecurity defenses.
9. Adopt an Efficient Content Management Solution
With the rise of sophisticated phishing attacks, malicious actors can steal sensitive information, leading to data breaches. To mitigate these risks, organizations should implement robust content management solutions that enable secure file sharing and regular data backups.
Regularly backing up data to secure locations becomes an essential cybersecurity practice safeguarding against ransomware attacks and data loss. By setting up automated backups and testing the recovery process, organizations can quickly restore important information when needed, ensuring smooth operations even in the face of unexpected threats.
10. Train Employees to Identify and Prevent Cyber Attacks
Training employees to spot and prevent cyberattacks is a vital component of any cybersecurity strategy. Regular sessions should equip staff with the skills to identify phishing attempts, social engineering attacks, and suspicious behavior.
Employees must understand the importance of protecting sensitive data, recognizing potential breaches, and promptly reporting any threats. Consistent training helps build a security-conscious workforce, minimizing the chances of human errors compromising your organization’s defenses.
Implementing these best practices helps organizations protect their endpoints, and secure sensitive data. Yet, these measures alone cannot completely address the modern complex endpoint security challenges. To further strengthen your cybersecurity approach, you must consider a solution that offers endpoint security and management across your organization.
Cybersecurity: The Way Forward with Veltar
Endpoint security forms a critical element for any effective cybersecurity strategy. As organizations adopt cybersecurity best practices, protecting endpoints like laptops, mobile phones, rugged devices, and IoT systems—becomes essential. It helps you ensure authorized access and mitigates potential data breaches. By securing endpoints, organizations can fortify their overall defenses, ensuring that sensitive data and critical endpoints are better protected against malicious threats.
Redefine how you protect, manage, and secure endpoints across your organization with Veltar, a comprehensive endpoint security solution. Veltar provides unified endpoint protection, enabling your organization to operate confidently in a threat-sensitive environment. Safeguard your critical assets while promoting innovation and agility, allowing you to focus on what truly matters—driving growth and success.
Consult our product experts to learn how Veltar lets you transform endpoint security strategy.
