5 Cybersecurity Steps All Small Business should take in 2024

02 Feb 5 Cybersecurity Steps All Small Business should take in 2024

Posted at 06:55h in Cybersecurity by Simon Spencer

Cybersecurity is a vital part of any business. With so many different ways for attacks and breaches to target your organisation in 2024, it’s now more important than ever to ensure that you know exactly how you can protect your business from the worst of cyberattacks.

But, knowing exactly what you need to do so you can protect yourself is a lot more difficult than it seems. There is so much to consider regarding cybersecurity that it can be overwhelming even to take the first step to improve your business’s security posture — especially if you’re a smaller organisation without the personnel to handle it.

In this article, we will look at five steps all small businesses need to take to ensure that their security standards are up to scratch for 2024.

Conduct a Cybersecurity Assessment

A cybersecurity assessment will allow you to take a look at your business’s security measures and take note of any vulnerabilities or gaps in your attack surface, to be able to address them and ensure that they are quickly fixed.

This is important for many reasons:

Identifying specific weaknesses: Of course, every business has its weaknesses. Knowing yours will help you be able to take those weaknesses and turn them into strengths, to make sure you don’t leave yourself vulnerable.
Risk Prioritisation: An assessment of your cybersecurity will let you know which parts of your business need to be addressed first due to higher risk, letting you prioritise the most important parts of your business first to ensure that those risks don’t lead to an incident.
Regulatory Compliance: By assessing your organisation, you can make sure your security standards are high enough to meet the requirements of compliance regulations such as GDPR.
Continuous Improvement: A cybersecurity assessment will let you ensure that you’re on track to improve, and continued assessment and monitoring will further let you ensure that your security posture only gets better.

Implement Holistic Security Measures

Holistic security measures are security measures that affect your whole organisation instead of specific aspects. They are meant to cover all bases and ensure that you’ve got at least some coverage throughout your business.

This is helpful, as it lets you:

Address diverse threats: By having general coverage throughout your organisation, you have at least some form of protection for a wide range of threats.
Unify your defense strategy: A holistic solution will let you bring together different parts of your organisation’s security strategy and unify it. This will overall strengthen your security posture and ensure there are no holes or vulnerabilities.
Data-centric protection: Holistic security measures are built to protect your data first and foremost, against a variety of threats. After all, data is your organisation’s most valuable asset — and endangering it will lead to a lot of catastrophe if left unchanged.

Educate and Train Staff

The most important tool against cybersecurity issues is knowledge. After all, knowing what steps you have to take will let you ensure that you take the right ones and that you’re prepared for anything that might come your way.

Educating and training your staff is a vital part of this. By doing so, you make sure that everyone in your organisation is aware of what needs to be done and why it’s so important, meaning that you can create a security-aware culture throughout the workplace.

The best way of doing this is to run training sessions with your staff, to ensure that everyone is clear on what is expected of them in regards to security. It’ll also let you keep track of their progress and help them brush up on aspects that they may find difficult or don’t fully understand.

Update & Patch Management

Updates are released to ensure that your software and tools are up to date. While this is important for features, it’s also important for ensuring that you have the latest security updates and patches. This helps keep you safe against issues within the software that might prove to be a vulnerability.

Failing to do these updates on time means that you’re leaving an opening for someone to take advantage of them and wreak havoc on your organisation. This is why ensuring that you have an update management system in place to ensure that you’re getting the patches you need as soon as they become available.

Create an Incident Response Framework

While it’s important to be able to prevent any cybersecurity situations, having a plan of action in place to be able to ensure your response to it is effective is vital to ensure that you’re ready in the event of a catastrophe.

An incident response framework will give you a back-to-basic way to recover and get your organisation back on track if everything does end up going wrong. By implementing one as early as possible, you can easily update and revise it based on your organisation’s needs and specifics at the time.

The most common framework used to create a plan for catastrophe is the NIST incident response life cycle:

Preparation: This is ensuring that you’re prepared for any threats that you may face.
Detection and analysis: Having good detection tools in place will help you catch anything that might seem awry.
Containment, Eradication, and Recovery: This is about finding the threat and taking care of it, as well as recovering from it.
Post-Incident Activity: Once the incident has happened and been dealt with, this is where you analyse what happened to see what could’ve been done differently.

How We Can Help

Your organisation’s cybersecurity is vital, as it will protect you from any malicious hackers or anyone else who wants access to your most sensitive information and data.

If you’re looking to get started with taking steps to protect your organisation but need a helping hand, reach out to us today. Our experts are here to help and will ensure that you’ve got a guide along your whole cybersecurity journey.