10 Practical Steps to Stronger Security

Many companies need to ramp up your security toward the ultimate goal of strong compliance level security.  This is a natural progression of security as companies grow or become more concerned about their data, system up-time, customer data, their reputations or satisfying their customer’s requirements for compliance level strong security.

Compliance level security, leverages regulation best practices to provide adequate and appropriate strong security for your specific company and situation.

Check out this previous post on When Companies need to Transition to Compliance Security to understand why companies need to make this transition.

10 Steps that Will Help Your Company Transition to Strong Compliance Level Security

1. Start with a security risk assessment – This should include a complete security review and appropriate security risk assessment tests (like vulnerability and penetration tests). A risk assessment is a critical first step and it can include security reviews, gap analysis, and any number of tests or diagnostics.

2. Define a balanced prioritized security strategy timeline using the risk assessment results

3. Plan for longer term threats in security plan timeline – Look at emerging threats and factor in spending and solutions that are likely to scale or expand to include solutions in these areas. Examples would be cloud application security, advanced threats, cloud data centers.

4. Define your outsourcing strategy – Most security can’t or shouldn’t be implemented completely in-house (including recommended 3^rd party risk assessments). Plan for internal resource overload or knowledge gaps.

5. Implement the solutions – create a time table and stick to it from the risk assessment strategy.

6. Configure your security properly to achieve desired results (and then test them) – this is a good place to use 3^rd party experts to define, review or manage solutions.

7. Define and document policies, processes and results

8. Use cyber-security awareness training for employees, management and tech staff – Training is frequently an overlooked area of security and without it, great security is rendered useless.

9. Add a suitable security monitoring (SIEM) solution – for compliance level security

10. Actively manage security – Define, configure, maintain, update, and adjust your security as required to keep it secure. This is another good place to use 3^rd party security expert partner to help.

Companies that are not proactive about taking key steps toward strong compliance level security are creating a ticking time bomb of business risk and are exposed to hidden security vulnerabilities.

To avoid that scenario, it’s a good idea to work with a third-party expert security provider, like eSecurity Solutions, which can perform a security risk assessment to define risks, vulnerabilities, and security gaps, and recommend appropriate solutions. We can also implement a year-round risk management program to assess, implement, maintain, monitor, and adjust security as required. Click here to contact us for more information.