How To Lower Your Cybersecurity Risk While Increasing Accessibility?

Ask any cybersecurity expert and they will tell you that your cybersecurity risk will increase as you expand the accessibility. With people, systems and devices accessing your business data, it makes your business prone to a devastating cybersecurity attack or data breach which can disrupt your business.

Striking the right balance between accessibility and security is crucial for businesses. Yes, you don’t want to compromise on data security but you also have to make sure that everyone who requires data access has it. 

In this article, Anti-Dos will share how you can minimize the cybersecurity risk while expanding access.

How To Reduce The Cybersecurity Risk While Increasing Accessibility?

Here are some of the ways you can use to reduce the cybersecurity risk even while expanding accessibility.

1. Embrace The Zero Trust Model

Businesses who are still using traditional security approaches in today’s sophisticated cybersecurity landscape are suffering big time. If you have made that mistake in the past or are currently making the same mistake, it is time to change course. Implement zero trust model, which offers ultimate protection against most threats. 

By default, nobody, whether it is a person, app or a device, is authorized to access data. As a result, every entity whether it is a user, device or system, they will have to get your approval before accessing your data. This minimizes the risk of access related abuse hence, minimizing the risk of cybersecurity attacks and data breaches. 

2. Monitor Vendors and Suppliers

Supply chain attacks have become a phenomenon lately. Instead of directly targeting businesses, cybercrimminals are now using third party suppliers and vendors as a ladder to reach businesses. Poor security controls and loose security policies on the supplier side has made the job of threat actors even easier.

Before hiring a vendor or supplier, carefully vet their security approach so you don’t have to regret later. Ask what security measures do they take to keep your data safe? No business wants to pay a hefty price due to poor security on the supplier end. After carefully vetting suppliers and vendors, you can allow them to access your data. 

Even better, conduct a cybersecurity audit to ensure that your supplier and vendors have you covered. This will give you a better idea about whether a particular supplier or vendor is actually worth working with or not. You can even provide them with some guidelines on what steps they can take to secure your data.

3. Develop a Risk Management Strategy

Before you get down to creating a risk management strategy, it is highly recommended that you analyze your current risk profile. What are the biggest risks that can have a negative impact on your business continuity? Once you have figured that out, you need to identify which of your business processes and functional units are more likely to be targeted by these threats? 

Use real time risk identification and mitigation solutions that can not only provide you with the details of the risk but also recommend a course of action you can take to eliminate those risks. The goal of creating a risk management strategy is to put processes in place that work on autopilot. All you have to do is to keep optimizing them according to the changing dynamics.

4. Implement Security Information and Event Management

With so many cybersecurity threats targeting businesses, it becomes extremely difficult to prioritize those threats before responding to them. Security information and event management solutions do the heavy lifting for you and tell you which threats can cause major business disruptions and which ones can not. This makes risk prioritization a breeze. Make sure you have Anti DDoS solutions in place to ensure business continuity.

Fuse it with your cybersecurity systems and security information and event management software can give you a clear picture about your current risk profile. Additionally, it even lets you respond to malicious events automatically and minimize the damage to a certain extent.

5. Put Cybersecurity Top of Mind

All the aforementioned steps would only work if cybersecurity is your top priority. If it is not, you will have to bring it top of mind first. With different cybersecurity stakeholders sharing different perspectives, having different opinions and disagreeing on different aspects of cybersecurity, developing a consensus is not easy.

You need to make sure that the onus of securing your business assets is not just on your cybersecurity team. Make it a shared responsibility where every stakeholder needs to play their role. This is only when your cybersecurity initiatives will achieve their desired results.

6. Cybersecurity Culture Makes All The Difference

Just like with making cybersecurity a priority, establishing a cybersecurity culture can make a world of difference. When you make cybersecurity a part of organziation culture, every employee is not only cyber aware but they also act responsibly. This mitigates the risk of social engineering attacks such as phishing attacks. In addition to this, every decision your business makes is done with cybersecurity in mind. This can have a huge positive effect on your organization and your overall risk will be reduced substantially.

How do you plan to mitigate the cybersecurity risk associated with expanding access? Let us know in the comments section below.