Your business likely maintains quite a bit of information on your customers, clients or patients, including personally identifiable information (PII). Depending on your industry, your business may be required to meet certain regulatory standards – such as HIPAA, NIST, CMMC, PCI, and ISO standards – on maintaining the security of those records. A data breach can mean big costs in money, productivity and reputation and often results in the loss of customers or even your business.
Ask yourself these questions to assess how important your company views IT security:
Are You Conducting Annual IT Security Risk Assessments?
At a minimum, your business should be conducting annual firm-wide IT security assessments to identify vulnerabilities, new threats, outdated software and other security lapses that need resolution. Security assessments provide you with a granular look at your IT solutions, practices and procedures, giving you the information you need to improve your technology, train your employees and install updated policies and procedures based on best practices.
A managed services partner like Applied Tech can help your business by performing a full security risk assessment, providing you with solutions to the risks found and benchmarking your company against those in the same industry. Applied Tech then helps you build an action plan to enhance your data security.
Are You Subject to HIPAA, NIST/CMMC, PCI or Other Regulatory Requirements?
If your business is in a regulated field, such as health care, you must continually advance your compliance with those regulations. You may never be fully compliant, but you must show a continual effort to meet and/or exceed regulatory requirements. Applied Tech has experienced and highly-trained staff focused on ensuring your business meets the requirements of its industry.
What Solutions Does Your Business Have in Place Today?
You absolutely must have a layered approach to security. Firewalls and anti-virus protection are no longer enough. Beyond risk assessments, what else should your business be doing to protect its confidential information?
A few recommended solutions include:
- Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA/2FA). This confirms an employee’s identity by using something they know (their password) and something they have (usually a smartphone) before they are allowed to login to your systems.
- Security Incident and Event Management (SIEM). These tools collect and log data of all activities on your network and securely store it for reference in the event of a security incident. Many tools can also provide an ongoing vulnerability management platform, serve as a guide to protecting your PCs and servers and generate alerts for security-related events on your network.
- Mobile Application Management (MAM). MAM prevents unauthorized access to your business’ data on employees’ personal mobile devices. It can also protect company devices by remotely locating and wiping devices and managing inventory.
- Disk encryption. Tools like BitLocker prevent data from being accessed via lost or stolen workstations or devices.
- Ongoing security awareness training. Your number one asset to combating threats? Making sure your employees can identify and avoid cybersecurity threats.
- Simulated phishing campaigns. These campaigns identify weaknesses in your employees’ training that you can then devise more tailored training for the employees that need it the most.
Does Your IT Provider Have an Internal Security Focus?
The managed IT services provider (MSP) you partner with to improve your information security should be highly focused on its own internal security as well. By giving an MSP the keys to your network, you are allowing them to access some of your most confidential, protected information. The MSP you choose better be fully secured. Otherwise, your entire network is at risk.
Applied Tech tests and deploys all information security solutions internally to help us stay compliant with HIPAA regulations. Through this real-life experience, we can recommend tools and processes that provide improved security without significant impact on productivity. It is easy for MSP vendors to talk about security. Applied Tech operates by these procedures on a daily basis.
HOW DOES YOUR INFORMATION SECURITY STACK UP?
Still not sure if you need to focus on improving your information security? Applied Tech can help you with our free security risk assessment estimator.
Need some more tips on how to improve your organization’s security? Click here.
Take the first step here in protecting your company’s most valuable assets.
