How to Improve Your Company’s Cyber Resilience

Downtime can completely disrupt your small business. Most SMBs don’t have access to an in-house IT security team. They don’t have enough money to hire security professionals. Hence, SMBs should consider working with a managed services provider. They can help you in improving your cyber resilience strategy. In this article, we are going to share some tips that will help you in improving your cyber resilience strategy.

Definition of Cyber Resilience:

The ability of your business to recover from security attacks like ransomware attack is known as cyber resilience. Modern businesses need to ensure that they have higher levels of cyber resilience. If your network is down, then your employees can’t access important data. This will decrease the productivity of your employees. Downtime can also affect your interactions with your customers. You will lose a lot of revenue due to downtime. Your loyal customers will move to other platforms. Thus, your business can lose credibility due to downtime and system interruptions. If your network is facing downtime, then it will drain your IT resources. Your IT staff will focus on bringing your network online. They will move away from their other strategic priorities. Due to this, it is difficult to calculate the true cost of downtime. You can lose a lot of potential revenue due to network downtime. Thus, you should ensure that you have a strong cyber resilience strategy. We are going to share some tips that you can follow for improving your cyber resilience strategy.

1. Train your employees

The weakest link in your security strategy is your employees. Hackers are still using phishing attacks for distributing their malware. Attachments and deceptive emails can deceive your employees. Your employees might end up downloading malware in your system. Hacking attacks are becoming more serious with time. Thus, you need to educate your employees about the latest security trends. A security awareness training program will ensure that your employees know about phishing. You should run phishing simulations for testing your employee knowledge. Make sure that they know about the best data security practices.

2. Use Advanced Antivirus

Hackers are becoming smarter with time. Businesses are also using effective methods for finding potential threats. Hackers have also adapted their methods with time for evading firewalls. They can penetrate through most of the defenses. Thus, companies need to deploy IT security with threat intelligence. You can use advanced antivirus solution for protecting your network. These advanced solutions will help you in detecting and blocking malicious attacks.

3. Deploy backup policies

Most businesses are storing their partner’s and customers’ data. Thus, it is their duty to protect this data from attackers. You need to ensure that you have a strong cyber resilience plan. A strong cyber resilience plan will help you in dealing with data loss, malware attack, hardware failure, malicious deletion, and natural disasters. It can be very difficult to detect data loss. If you are manually checking your files, then you will waste a lot of time. Thus, you must ensure that you are storing the backup of your files. Scheduled backup will help you in dealing with issues like ransomware. If you are storing backup with file versioning, then you can easily restore all your files. This is one of the most important features that you need. If you are manually backing up your data, then sometimes you will forget about it. This will lead to data loss. The only way to deal with ransomware attacks is by doing a scheduled backup. This can save thousands of dollars as you don’t need to worry about paying any ransom.

4. Use cloud technology for remote file access

If you are storing your backup files on an on-site server, then you can quickly recover your data. However, you should also store your backups in the cloud platform. Most employees are now working from their homes due to the coronavirus pandemic. Thus, they need remote access to your files. Remote file access is very important for your business continuity. If you are storing your backup copies on the cloud, then your users can access them remotely. This will ensure that your business is protected from local site disaster. If you want to create a strong cyber resilience plan, then you must store your backups in the cloud server. The cloud technology will help you in improving IT resilience. It will provide agility to your business. Thus, you should consider moving your resources to the cloud.

5. Test your recovery strategy

You should make sure that you can recover your files during a disaster. Thus, you should first perform some recovery drills. You should test your disaster recovery procedures and practices as it will help you in enhancing cyber resilience. Disasters like data loss, natural disasters, and security breaches can hit your business at any time. You should check your cyber resilience strategy regularly. Make sure that you can perform large-scale system recovery during a disaster. Some files are going to be more important to you. You should make multiple backups of these files as it will ensure that you can easily recover these files. Also, you should use DRaaS or disaster recovery as a service for protecting your ultra-critical systems. In this, you will have access to a secondary environment. You can test your disaster recovery protocols in this secondary environment without affecting the main systems. It is important to do proper testing before deploying any technology. This will ensure that your business will be cyber resilient during a disaster.

Conclusion

Downtime can be catastrophic for SMBs. It can disrupt your entire business and you can lose a lot of revenue due to it. Many small businesses can even shut down due to downtime. Thus, you should ensure that your business is protected from downtime. You should work on creating a strong cyber resilience solution. Experienced MSPs like Bleuwire can help you in creating this plan. They will ensure that you can maintain business continuity. If you need more information regarding cyber resilience, then you can contact Bleuwire.

Contact us today to learn about Bleuwire™  services and solutions in how we can help your business.