As our society becomes increasingly digital, our ever-growing reliance on data and interconnectivity is opening the gates to new risks that are massive in scale and have a cascading disruptive impact.
Enterprises are under constant pressure to adopt new digital transformation initiatives to achieve greater agility and efficiency through automation of business processes.
However, the dramatic proliferation of heterogeneous IT alongside the growing sophistication of modern cyberattacks threats has also exponentially increased an enterprises exposure to security risks.
For every enterprise, security consists of not only safeguarding their own data and endpoints, but also the data of their customers including purchase details, marketing information, buying choices or even the name of the street they live on. And when this confidential and private data gets compromised, it can have severe repercussions, much greater today than ever before.
So, how can business leaders protect their data without sacrificing business agility?
The first step to protecting your business is to accept that the threat is real, and it applies to you. The common perception that larger enterprises are more susceptible to data breaches seeds a false sense of security for smaller companies, as research data proves that smaller enterprises are equally at risk of attack, with the number expected to rise.
The next step to securing your frontiers requires a sound and robust cybersecurity strategy that harnesses modern solutions and tools to improve network visibility, establish a correlation between security risks and business processes, and find the right balance between strong protection and agile productivity.
And finally, given that insiders – employees, and the extended network of suppliers and contractors – remain the greatest source of security incidents, improving the cybersecurity health of your organization will depend on constant cybersecurity education and training employees, customers and suppliers on security basics like how to spot and avoid dangerous websites and phishing scams.
Leverage VPNs to protect personal and company data while using open networks; make BYOD usage less vulnerable.
For an enterprise, the smallest gateway to a breach can have the most catastrophic effect. So, make sure to safeguard all your fronts. Because we are only as secure as our weakest link.