How to Develop a Security Strategy that Fits Your Business’ Needs

Today’s businesses need to be prepared for threats of all kinds…that’s unfortunately just fact. Modern cyberattacks are not only getting more effective, they’re also able to be a lot less discerning about who they target. This creates exponentially more risk for businesses of all sizes. Let’s go over how you can develop a cybersecurity strategy that helps temper this risk a bit.

What Should Your Cybersecurity Strategy Planning Process Include?

Let’s go through the steps that will lead you to a better cybersecurity outcome:

1. Assess Your Risk

In order to create an effective cybersecurity strategy, you need to know the state of your current cybersecurity posture. A cybersecurity risk assessment is the first step to identifying where your biggest security deficits lie—perhaps a few team members are particularly susceptible to phishing, or a few critical updates were never installed on your network. Collecting and compiling this information, as well as the value of the data your business stores, will help ensure the later steps address your risk appropriately.

2. Establish Your Security Goals

Drawing from the overarching goals of the company as a whole for reference, determine what your security needs will be in the future. This will enable you to set goals that match what your business will require. Once your goals have been identified, you should create a plan to ensure they are all achieved promptly. Don’t be afraid to prioritize some of the easier objectives so their successful implementation can help motivate further progress.

3. Develop a Risk Management Plan and Security Policies

Once you have clear goals outlined, you’re ready to start developing your operational security strategy. One critical aspect of this is identifying where your biggest risk factors are and what steps you can take to resolve them through assorted workplace policies. What do your data privacy and protection policies look like? What about your incident response plan? These policies will help shape how your strategy is ultimately implemented.

4. Enact and Evaluate

With your freshly devised security strategy ready to go, the next step is to put the different elements into place. Setting aggressive, but realistic deadlines for your improvements will help you complete your implementation, and regularly evaluating how effective these improvements have been will aid you in making the best decisions and changes.

We Can Help You With This Process!

Trust the team we have here at Directive to assist you with your business’ cybersecurity, and the rest of your IT needs as well. Give us a call at 607.433.2200 to learn more.