Spending On Information Assurance Could Save Your Finances
In an age when it is possible for hackers to penetrate your network and gain access to finance information or customer passwords, it is crucial that you invest the necessary money into information security. Doing so can not only prevent a disaster, but it can pay for itself in the immediate future. The smaller a company is, furthermore, the more they should commit to protecting their information.
The Money You Invest
Small businesses usually invest about twenty percent of their IT budget in security, while large corporations only put about five percent in. The dynamics such as the size of the company, the culture of the office, the requirements for regulation, and the vertical scale can all determine what amount of money you should be spending, but the bottom line is simple — those that leave their IT unprotected will soon regret it. Here are a few finance tips to get more out of the dollars you do spend.
Set Up a Disaster Scenario
Just like you want firefighters to be prepared for a large blaze, so too do you want your IT core to be able to handle a security breach. Draw up strategies for how different departments or disciplines will handle a breach. It is not recommended that a response team be only the IT team or only the security team, since they may need to handle several different concerns. You want your HR, legal, and any PR departments to be notified of a breach so that they are able to help mitigate the damage. Create a plan that is simple but comprehensive — many companies claim that they have not gotten around to doing so and are quite vulnerable — so that everyone knows their place if the worst is to happen.
Choose a Response
When you are being hacked and valuable information is at risk, the natural response is to shut down the containment and do your best to recover quickly. However, it may be just as valuable to sit back and watch an attack — yes, you read that correctly — as it is to cut it off cold. By having an IT forensics unit that can determine the points of entry and the breaching methods that a hacker would use to get past a firewall, you are able to see where the weak points are in your company’s digital armor. You need to know how to minimize future threats, especially in the event that your information is under attack not from an individual but from a much more advanced and organized operation. The threat of hackers from China or from organized crime should not be laughed at, since millions of attempts to break into a company’s online vaults are launched each day.
Change Is Good
A sitting target is an easy thing to hit. By constantly changing how your IT department operates, you can make sure that hackers are kept guessing and that your information is kept safe. Mix up your firewalls regularly, even if it means spending money to change providers, so that there is no way to launch an assault on any vulnerable software. Demand that your employees change their passwords frequently, at least as often as once per year, and that they use passwords that are not words found in a dictionary.
Use backups for all valuable information, whether it is employee social security numbers or just an inventory order. Remember that whenever it is necessary to change an aspect of your network, such as during daylight savings time, you are at your most vulnerable, so run checks and double-checks that nothing is compromised when a large change is put into motion.
Author Bio
Joshua Turner is a writer who creates informative articles in relation to business. In this article, he describes in importance of investing in business security and aims to encourage further study with a Norwich University masters in information security.
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Category: Business Crime, Business Website, Identity Theft
