Running a business these days mainly online means your reputation, operations, and revenue all depend on a thin, invisible wire called digital security. Unfortunately, cyber threats are faster, conduct AI-assisted attacks, and are more convincing when they approach your team under pretenses. As expected, the financial consequences of a data breach are more extensive than ever. Being proactive, instead of reactive, is the only realistic way to manage and minimise the risk.
This article functions like a practical guide that provides you with a series of steps you can use to improve enterprise security and scale as fast as possible.
Measure first: know your risk and assets
How can you protect your business when you don’t know what exactly needs your protection? Make an inventory of the digital crown jewels (admin consoles, customer data, payment flow, source repos, APIkeys, and other similar things) and assign their impact levels on the business. Use automated asset discovery on premises and in the cloud, and update the inventory periodically. Keep in mind that traditional servers are often more resilient than cloud-native resources that tend to be destroyed as often as they are created. Use a simple risk register together with the pair asset mapping to understand what could happen, how likely certain scenarios are, and how they would impact the business. Review the inventory at least quarterly.
Adopt a zero-trust position and least-privilege access
In the digital age, zero-trust isn’t a product but rather a philosophy any successful business adopts because it assumes that all requests are untrustworthy until proven otherwise. Make sure to enforce least-privilege for services and identities, require short-lived credentials for machine-to-machine access, and segment cloud workloads and networks so if an attacker breaches one area, they cannot move laterally. In practice, it means that role-based access control is reviewed regularly, ephemeral IAM tokens are in place and micro-segmentation is instituted for critical services.
Use an enterprise password manager
Unexpectedly, passwords remain a major attack vector, but with the help of an enterprise password manager you can turn liabilities into controllable control. You can use the enterprise password manager to create and store unique and complex credentials for all accounts, centrally enforce password policies and rotation schedules, and provide secure sharing and access auditing, so no sensitive passwords are emailed or stored in plain text. Additionally it can assist you in integrating single sign-on and provision workflows to automate onboarding and off-boarding.
By adopting an enterprise solution you cut the risk of credential reuse (a main cause of data breaches) and create an audit trail for compromised credential investigations. Data shows that the password-manager sector is expanding rapidly as businesses integrate them into their operations, so the market registers notable growth and adoption momentum lately. When searching for a password manager for your team to use, look towards solutions with enterprise key management options, hardware-backed encryption, SSO + SCIM provisioning support, and fine-grained logging that feeds your SIEM. And last but not least train your team on safe usage patterns, meaning they cannot use it for personal purposes.
Enforce multi-factor authentication where possible
Multi-factor authentication is one of the most effective methods to control data. Modern studies and industry guidance have shown that the majority of compromised accounts lack multi-factor authentication – as enabling MFa blocks the vast majority of automated takeover attempts. It would be smart for your business to make multi-factor authentication mandatory for high-privilege (and not only) accounts. You could also use phishing-resistant methods where possible with hardware tokens, passkeys, and FIDO2. All risky sessions must require the use of adaptive MFA.
Harden your email and train your team against phishing
Phishing and business email compromise have remained the main ingress paths for cybercriminals over the last couple of years, so you should exploit the idea of deploying and tuning email security controls like DMARC, DKIM, SPF, apply anti-phishing URL and attachment scanning policies, and enable mailbox-level alerts for abnormal forwarding rules and external auto-replies. However, in the present context, technology alone isn;t enough, you also need to train your team through realistic and recurrent phishing simulations and provide them with short but focused on remediation training, in case they fail the tests. The number of phishing attacks is quite high, industry telemetry shows millions of phishing attempts quarterly, so only measured and periodic training could help your team avoid them.
Patch, monitor, and automate response
Observability and patch management are crucial these days. Your goal is to reduce the time between vulnerability disclosure and remediation, and when you cannot patch quickly, you could apply compensating controls with micro-segmentation, WAF rules, and IPS signature. Your business environment should have an arsenal of tools that allows it to identify anomalies such as endpoint detection and response (EDR), aggregated logs, cloud workload protection platforms, and a SIEM that ingests these signals. Playbooks are useful for dealing with common incidents because they enable your team to act quickly and consistently in case of data security issues.
Protect API keys, secrets, and machine identities
Your online business most likely depends on APIs and automation, so secret sprawl (API keys sitting in config files, repos, and developer machines) are a major security risk. Employ secret management systems, scan repos for secrets, enforce short-lived service credentials, and require that CI/CD pipelines obtain secrets only at runtime for a vault, to protect valuable information. More importantly, rotate keys frequently and record use patterns to detect a misuse.
Plan for incident response and tabletop exercises
Sometimes even with the greatest prevention techniques, breaches still happen and you have to be ready to deal with such an instance. A written incident response plan that’s tested with tabletop exercises can save you time and money when a real incident occurs. Establish the incident communication channels (PR and legal), roles, data-retention for forensic needs and escalation criteria.
Proactive efforts matter
The financial scale of cyber risk is real for businesses of all sizes, and especially those that operate online. The average breach costs and consumer losses have been rising over the years, and according to global reports the average cost of a data breach approaches multi-million dollar figures these days.
