Poor Practices Lead to Security Gaps

On and off cyber-attacks across industries has become a regular thing. However unpleasant it might be, the truth is your assets, in the form of information, are under regular threat of cyber-attacks. This is largely due to gaping holes in information security and lapses in security practice. The lapses occur due to a number of reasons, some of them being employee mistakes or gaps in the organisation’s security program.

Hackers have breached systems of insurance companies, organisations providing personal and confidential services, to bank databases, thereby causing a loss of over $1 billion. The losses caused are not only monetary in nature as these attacks have also claimed human lives. People whose lives have been shattered over exposure of their private information out in public or the ones who lost their hard-earned savings have been affected worst.

These incidents beg the question “What can be done to plug these security gaps?”

Here are some things that organisations can do to ensure robust security practices and hard to breach security framework.

Written and established policies

Your security framework should not be something that is communicated to your employees through spoken words. There should be a broad set of guidelines that have been written with due consideration and handed to employees with the understanding that they follow these rules to the T. Organisations should imbibe the sense of responsibility in their employees and train them well on how to handle sensitive data.

Risk assessment

The world of technology is dynamic. It changes often and so should your security and risk practices. Regular assessment of risk helps you identify gaps that might arise in your company’s security framework in regular intervals. Setting up security framework once does not mean that your company and its information is secure forever. Every day, the Internet sees new malware, virus and hacking techniques mushrooming. Regular risk assessments will help you spot areas that need better security protocols.

Disaster management

Even if you have put in place robust security controls you should always have a disaster management plan in place in case your organisation does suffer a cyber-attack. You should establish a particular set of protocol to follow and to control damage and loss of data. Backing up data and setting up alerts in case an attack occurs, so you can contain the loss immediately, should go a long way in ensuring data protection.

Investing in risk management and security acts as an insurance against possible cyber-attacks. As such, this is something that every organisation should look into and work upon.