It doesn't make sense to spend a lot on supplements designed to keep you healthy if you also don't wash your hands. In the same vein, investing in advanced cybersecurity solutions is a waste if you don't have good fundamental cyber hygiene, also called IT hygiene. It's as crucial to minimizing your data breach risk as clean hands are to helping you avoid catching a cold.
What Cyber Hygiene Is and Why You Need ItIT hygiene involves best practices related to cybersecurity to protect your network and infrastructure from threats. It serves as the essential foundation for a proactive and comprehensive approach to data security. If everyone around you was coughing and sneezing, you'd probably step up your person hygiene to avoid getting sick. Likewise, in this era of widespread data breaches and hacking, your business should be doing the cybersecurity equivalent of wiping surfaces down with disinfectant.
Excellent cyber hygiene involves the following:
- Using the right tools. You can't achieve optimal security without an arsenal of advanced cybersecurity tools tailored to meet your organization's needs. That includes not only anti-virus/anti-malware software but also next-gen firewall, email/spam filtering, Managed Detection and Response (MDR) for your network and endpoints, and more. Visit our Managed Cybersecurity Solutions page for more information.
- Knowing what's connected to your network. Taking inventory and maintaining awareness of what's linked to your network is an essential part of proper IT hygiene.
- Updating everything on a regular basis. Making sure that apps, devices and operating systems are routinely patched and updated
- Enforcing best practices for passwords. Many data breaches result from weak and stolen passwords. Informing everyone in your organization about best password practices – such as not using the same ones across multiple accounts and changing them regularly – is crucial.
- Ensuring remote workers have secure access points. If you have team members who work from home or otherwise operate remotely, it's essential to give them the tools needed to securely connect to the corporate network, such as a virtual private network (VPN).
Our team of IT security experts can help improve your cyber hygiene with a range of best-in-class solutions. These are just some of the products and services we offer to optimize your cybersecurity strategy.
- User rights management: This involves controlling the resources that users/employees can access, as well as the actions they can perform with those resources.
- Data privacy/data management security: A carefully thought-out strategy for ensuring secure data management can dramatically reduce your company's data breach risk level. Data privacy solutions can include the following:
- Content filtering
- Spam filtering
- DNS filtering
- Next-gen firewalls
- Employee awareness training
- Establishment of best security practices
- And more
- Password policies and solutions: Establishing password policies, ensuring your staff members are aware of them, and adopting solutions like a password manager can prevent hackers from getting access to your data by guessing or stealing login info.
- Security awareness training: Ensuring your employees are well-informed about best practices for data protection is crucial. With our advanced security awareness training platform, we can orchestrate fully automated simulated phishing attacks to test your team members' threat recognition skills.
- Two-factor authentication: This security solution adds an extra layer of protection on top of password policies, making it much more difficult for intruders to gain unauthorized access to accounts and data.
- Database vulnerability management: Pinpoint and fix database vulnerabilities before cybercriminals get the chance to exploit them.
- Full Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) and Security Operations Center as a Service (SOCaaS): Rest assured that you've got cybersecurity covered with our end-to-end comprehensive MSSP offering and SOCaaS. Our security experts will leverage multiple layers of advanced tools and services to safeguard your data against evolving threats.
For more information about cyber hygiene and our portfolio of managed cybersecurity services, contact us today by calling 877-599-3999 or email sales@stratospherenetworks.com. Don't wait until you've already been breached to clean up!