Future-Proofing Your Business: Cybersecurity Due Diligence as an Ongoing Process

Forward-looking companies of all sizes have long since realized cybercrime isn’t something that only happens to others, but an item to account for as part of the cost of doing business.

Yours might already have a cybersecurity strategy, but will that strategy protect you from future trends as well as current ones?

This article examines the need for future-proofing your cybersecurity efforts. It also offers starter tips on practices to implement for better preparedness.

Why Is Future-Proofing Cybersecurity Crucial for Businesses of All Sizes?

Businesses need to innovate and adapt to stay relevant. An up-to-date cybersecurity strategy needs to be part of these efforts. Business ideas should also include measures to address the evolving and increasingly sophisticated digital threat landscape.

Such threats have come a long way from the early 2000s when spam, spyware, and the occasional virus were top-level concerns. Today's threats are exponentially more complex.

They have to be since cybersecurity advances force criminals to think outside the box, too. Now, there's ransomware, large crypto mining operations, and AI-assisted malware that can lay dormant and infect a system at the most inconvenient time.

Most SMBs have an online presence nowadays. Even if yours doesn’t, it’s irresponsible to think that there are no ways for hackers or other bad actors to access and misuse your company’s digital assets.

A carefully crafted phishing email or disgruntled employee with insider access is all it takes for an unprepared business to suffer major financial, reputational, and credibility damage.

It’s possible to mitigate most of these threats by adopting a proactive approach that anticipates cybersecurity challenges and handles them through established processes.

The Importance of Continued Due Diligence for Your Business’s Cybersecurity Health

A comprehensive cybersecurity strategy hinges on a thorough understanding of your network and its vulnerabilities. That’s why risk assessments are a fundamental way of exercising due diligence in ensuring the systems in place can handle current and future challenges.

A business venture starts with an audit of the network, stored data, users and privileges, and past incidents. It's impossible to safeguard and future-proof a network's security without knowing what you store and where, not to mention being unaware of all the devices that connect to it.

You'll also want to work with independent contractors to provide penetration testing of your defenses. This ethical process exposes weaknesses and security oversights, allowing you to patch them before a cyber crook can take advantage.

Risk assessment also helps demonstrate due diligence concerning compliance. Depending on where it operates from and who its customers are, your company can be subject to both industry regulations and overarching consumer protection laws like the GDPR or CIPA.

Future-Proofing Best Practices

Safeguarding your business from cyber threats is a multifaceted endeavor. On the one hand, you have to get everyone up to speed on correct behavior and best practices to minimize the impact of human error. On the other, IT teams need to keep abreast of the latest developments and implement new cybersecurity solutions as they become available and feasible.

Rethinking Your Network’s Perimeter

The push towards remote and hybrid work, along with a proliferation of IoT devices in the workplace, calls for a paradigm shift when assessing network perimeters.

You can’t concentrate all your heavy-hitting cybersecurity measures at a single physical location anymore, so identity rather than perimeter-based solutions are in order.

A business VPN is the first one you should adopt. VPNs protect outgoing and incoming connections with an encrypted layer that hackers can't penetrate. This lets remote workers or branch offices interact freely with the company network and any sensitive data you store without it being compromised or tracked.

Employee Training

Robust hardware and software protections lose much of their efficacy in an environment where employees’ cybersecurity hygiene standards are low. Reused, easy-to-guess passwords and URL phishing scams have already caused more than their fair share of damage.

Getting everyone up to speed and investing in annual refresher courses will help employees remain vigilant even as these dangers become more sophisticated.

Zero Trust Network Access Policy

Part of making company networks more robust is rethinking their structure and role management, and Zero Trust is the policy to adopt. It asserts that each user needs only the bare minimum privileges that let them perform their duties adequately.

This means entire network segments should be off-limits to certain user classes. User identification and confirmation also benefit from technologies like multi factor authentication.

AI Integration

Artificial intelligence and subsets like machine learning are upending the cybersecurity landscape. AI models can interpret vast amounts of data and detect patterns that lesser tools couldn't.

They can recognize emerging threats existing databases have no record of and devise appropriate counters. Moreover, AI allows businesses to leverage behavioral analytics to deal with anomalous processes and suspicious users more effectively. These capabilities can inspire innovative AI startup ideas.

Conclusion

Remaining resilient in an age where it’s possible to predict what form the next big cyber threat will take is challenging yet necessary.

If we can predict anything, it’s that complacent businesses are going to pay the price of stagnation sooner rather than later. Don’t let yours fade into the grim stats and start strengthening its cybersecurity response capabilities.

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