12 Steps to Make Your IT Infrastructure More Secure: Adopt a Proactive Approach

If you’ve been following our series on securing your IT infrastructure so far, you’ve already gotten a lot of work done. From performing a security audit to updating your firewall to safeguarding mobile devices, you’ve almost completed our process to ensure you’re as protected as possible from hackers, malware, and data breaches.

If you’re new to this series or if you’d like to go back and review, here are the previous steps in the process:

1. Performing a security audit

2. Creating and enforcing IT security policies

3. Updating your anti-virus solution

4. Updating workstations and servers

5. Guarding your email with a hosted spam solution

6. Implementing a hosted DNS solution

7. Updating your firewall

8. Implementing a backup solution

9. Auditing your servers

10. Securing your WiFi

11. Safeguarding mobile devices

Once you’ve completed these 11 steps, you’re ready to move on to the final element necessary to secure your IT infrastructure as much as possible: Adopting a proactive approach to IT security.

Why You Need a Proactive Approach
The IT security threat landscape is constantly evolving. Hackers are becoming increasingly crafty, and new malicious programs seeking unauthorized access to sensitive information pop up every day. To effectively defend your organization against ever-changing threats, you’ll need to take action before a data breach occurs. Being reactive rather than proactive could lead to disaster for your business because of the following factors:

-The cost per hour in the form of lost productivity if your business loses access to important data

-How a data breach or losing access to data will affect clients and your company’s reputation

-How stolen trade secrets or compromised data could affect your organization

-The amount of time it will take to bounce back from a cyberattack

There are a few steps you should take to proactively protect your business against IT security threats and their potentially devastating effects. If you look to prevent and detect threats before they cause damage to your organization, you’re much less likely to suffer significant damages from a data breach. Here’s what you need to do.

1. Review security practices regularly. Because the IT security threat landscape changes rapidly, you’ll need to continually re-evaluate your security policies and practices to make sure they’re up-to-date. Letting your organization lag behind could leave you vulnerable to new malicious entities seeking access to your infrastructure.

2. Continue awareness training. User errors often lead to data breaches, so it’s crucial to keep every member of your organization up to speed on best security practices. As the threats your business faces evolve, you’ll need to keep educating your employees on how to combat them.

3. Conduct audits on your security practices on an annual basis (at minimum). The very first step in our process for securing your IT infrastructure was conducting a security audit. To keep up with evolving cyber threats, you should repeat this step at least once every year.

4. Implement a managed security solution to provide an extra layer of detection and response to threats. Combating rapidly evolving cybersecurity threats can prove challenging, so it can help to turn to a managed security solution to prevent, identify, and combat malware. These solutions can include two factor authentication, next-generation firewalls, security information and event management (SIEM), and more.

Congratulations on completing the Stratosphere Networks process to make sure your IT infrastructure is secure! Although protecting your business from cyberattacks is an ongoing task, it’s easier to fight IT security threats when you’re informed about what you need to do and tackle it proactively. If you have any questions about infrastructure security, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team at Stratosphere Networks by calling 877-599-3999 or emailing sales@stratospherenetworks.com.

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