Data breaches are becoming increasingly expensive for business. According to research, the average cost of a data breach in Australia is $3.35 million per breach, an increase of 9.8% year on year.
No matter how small or large your business, or what sector you operate in, you are vulnerable to a data breach and will suffer a cybersecurity incident at some point.
However, just because you suffer a cyber-attack, doesn’t mean you have to end up involved in a breach costing millions. By taking a proactive approach to cybersecurity, you can up your defences and lower the cost of a breach. Here’s how to do it.
Put In Place An Incident Response Plan
There’s a well known saying: fail to prepare, prepare to fail. Nothing could be more true in the case of cybersecurity incidents. So, improve your odds by putting in place an incident response plan, which will empower your team to react efficiently and confidently in the event of a cybersecurity incident.
Train Employees on Common Threats
A simple but effective way to reduce data breaches is to educate employees on common cybersecurity threats like phishing emails, malvertising and SMS-ishing. Training your employees on what these threats look like and how to report them can drastically reduce the likelihood of a successful social engineering attack.
Conduct Regular Penetration Tests
A penetration test is a security assessment undertaken by a suitably skilled security researcher. It effectively mimics a real world attack on your systems, with the aim of uncovering vulnerabilities in your infrastructure that a hacker could exploit.
After the test, you’ll receive a report identifying the most critical vulnerabilities that you should address urgently to improve your cyber resilience.
We recommend conducting a penetration test at least once a year, or after a big system change, to reduce the likelihood of a costly breach.
Use The Best Security Solutions
Security solutions are one of the best ways to prohibit, identify and mitigate cybersecurity attacks on your systems. There are lots of security tools out there, each with their own promises, which can make things pretty confusing.
From our view, the best security approach is a layered one, where you implement security controls throughout your IT infrastructure so that, even if an attacker manages to break into one layer, they’ll still be stopped at the next. Moreover, you’ll want to make sure that you choose security solutions that address the unique security and compliance risks your organisations face.
We recommend working with a managed IT provider that can choose the right tools for you at the right price. At Connected Platforms, we take this a step further. We’ll implement and manage your security solutions for you, so you don’t have to worry about security at all.
Consider Cyber Insurance Coverage
Cybersecurity insurance is a form of cover that helps you to recover from the financial damages associated with a data breach. While cyber insurance coverage doesn’t protect against breaches, it can ease monetary burdens after an attack.
Saying this, we don’t recommend cyber insurance coverage for every business. This is because cover is becoming increasingly expensive and hard to come by. Before you even thinking about investing in insurance, we recommend you first look at bolstering your security defences. It is better to be proactive than reactive when it comes to data breaches and cybersecurity.
Backup Your Data Regularly
One of the biggest threats to businesses in this day and age is ransomware. The best defence against ransomware? Backing up your data. Backing up data is the process of making copies of your data so that, if it’s lost or stolen, you can continue operations with minimal disruption.
You can backup your data either manually or automatically. For most companies, we recommend automatic backups, as these are more efficient and reliable than having to remember to manually backup important files.
Move Towards Zero Trust
Zero trust is a security approach in which your organisation moves away from giving users unfettered access to your network and corporate resources. Every user must be dynamically identified and verified in order to interact with company data, which is a great way to reduce data breaches caused by credentials compromise.
Zero trust isn’t a solution. Rather, it’s a collection of different security solutions that can be used throughout the technology stack. One of the easiest ways to implement zero trust is through multi-factor authentication, instead of relying on static passwords.
Breaches Don’t Have to Mean Huge Expenses – We Can Help
While data breaches have become a fact of life, losing millions of dollars doesn’t have to be an outcome. By being proactive about cybersecurity, you can mitigate the costs of data breaches and improve your levels of cybersecurity maturity.
Get in touch with Connected Platforms today to get a free quote for our entire suite of business continuity solutions and IT support services in Brisbane.
Call us on (07) 3062 6932 or get in touch with us online to speak to our trusted team today.
