Cybersecurity Needs to Shift

Cybersecurity Needs to Shift

With some motivation from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, cybersecurity needs to shift within businesses. Typically, businesses would take a more measured approach in their day-to-day security improvements. They’d also act swiftly if there was any kind of clear and present danger. While this proved effective, the current situation has now shifted priorities over to maintaining resilience. Let’s examine some of these shifts, and how an advantage can be gained through a consistent cybersecurity strategy.

Cybersecurity Needs to Shift: The Changes We’ve Seen

For such an… eventful… year, it started off with little anticipation of the events to come. Businesses had ample time to plan their 2020 technology budgets. Most (if not all) of these budgets were postponed or abandoned with the spread of COVID-19.

Cybercriminals are typically quite opportunistic, and so many took advantage of the crisis at hand to strike. Exacerbating this issue even further, many businesses saw their security budgets as a candidate for budget cuts and borrowing funds. Due to these circumstances, these businesses had weakened security measures when strong security would be needed the most.

However, industry analysts have found the events that have followed somewhat surprising. While security spending was cut by many, the investments that remain are still mitigating attacks. In fact, data breaches fell by a full third during the first half of 2020.

Many businesses are wondering if the investments they were making into their cybersecurity were actually helping them all that much.

Don’t Abandon What Works

Let’s identify a few security investments that—despite the shifting viewpoints on cybersecurity spending—should not be sacrificed:

• Endpoint protection – There are policies that you need to have in place to keep threats out of your business. Cybercriminals now have some very sophisticated means of gaining access. This means you need to be able to detect, identify, contain, and neutralize these attacks.
• Employee training – Nowadays, phishing attacks are one of, if not the, most popular cyberthreats out there today. To keep your network and data sufficiently secure, make sure employees can identify a phishing attempt and address it.
• Encryption for remote connections – Remote work has become a very popular option. This makes your security as you implement such a strategy no less important. Implementing a trustworthy remote access solution or installing an enterprise VPN will help to protect your business.
• Mobile access management – The smartphone is an essential business tool. It is used for personal use. Therefore, it is crucial that you have the protections in place to secure these devices.

With these technologies supporting your security, you can maintain your productivity without putting your resources and data at risk.

How to Move Forward

With so many businesses tightening their belts and their budgets, it’s a safe bet that we’ll see emerging strategies. They will integrate what we have learned in the past regarding the limited finances that organizations have access to today. In short, we’ll see far more cost-efficient cybersecurity platforms coming to the fore. We’re confident that these platforms will commonly feature a few strategies:

• Building unified resilience – Which sounds easier, protecting a few disparate departments or protecting an entire business with consistent security practices? Obviously, the latter. Establishing a universal strategy can help reduce overhead spent on support as well as encourage a more continuous business.
• Improving cyber hygiene – Many organizations lack a sufficient system to properly manage the different levels of access their digital resources should require. Implementing such a system can provide operational benefits to all levels of the business that does so.
• Focusing on cooperation– While the pandemic separated many from their coworkers, it demonstrated how crucial it is to work together. Keeping up a standard of shared security responsibility makes it harder for bad actors to successfully strike.

Cybersecurity needs to be a major focus point from here on out, even more so than it was before. Link High Technologies Inc. can help you implement the protections you need. Reach out to our experts today by calling (973) 659-1350.