As the world reacts to the rapidly evolving Coronavirus situation, many company executives face major risk mitigation decisions for their companies. Here are five areas for businesses to focus on to ensure a secure IT environment for their continued operations:
Businesses must ensure that their enterprise VPN, networks, nodes, and other remote access tools are patched constantly to protect their network against attackers. Employees should be able to function remotely using company-issued computer systems with installed anti-malware security software for enhanced end-point protection.
Cyber attackers tend to target basic security vulnerabilities. These include unpatched Windows operating systems, weak passwords and gullible end-users. To secure information assets from the increasing threat of cyber threats to their information infrastructure, many organizations now conduct risk tests to find their vulnerabilities before the bad guys do.
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies are increasingly popular these days, but are they right for your organization? Before you go ahead with BYOD, be sure to perform a risk assessment and obtain legal counsel. BYOD doesn’t work in every industry; make sure your policies can work within your regulatory and compliance framework. Needless to say, your employees’ devices need to integrate securely with the company’s network.
Every organization needs to mirror its data. Backing up data ensures that a business can recover deleted or destroyed data easily with no downtime to operations. Most companies now implement a plan to periodically back up files, or simply store live content in the cloud with real-time backups in a secure offsite location.
Most businesses today rely on third-party vendors, creating a new sphere for IT risks. To maintain their safety, companies need to align their own security system with their vendors’. This will entail risk-rating their vendors, creating specific security policies to which vendors must conform, and implementing a vendor performance monitoring program for continued maintenance and alignment.
