The risks and threats to the network security and infrastructure of any business or organization are numerous and continuous. There are about as many kinds of risks and threats out there which pose potential harm or damage to the security and operational capability of your network assets and resources. This is further complicated by the existence of a lot of vulnerabilities in your network despite your best efforts to minimize the risks.
Improving your risk remediation capabilities is one way to manage the risks and threats against your network security and capability. If you’re a company or organization operating in Canada and you’re looking for ways to improve your network and infrastructure security, you might want to look into managed IT services in Toronto from Tenecom and others.
Here are a few suggested steps to improve your company’s risk remediation capabilities:
1. Assess Your Existing Risk Remediation Capabilities
With the increasing adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT), companies are stepping up their efforts in cybersecurity improvement. The first step that any company or organization should do to improve its risk remediation capabilities is to assess its existing risk remediation framework and capabilities. To do a risk assessment, you’ll have to take into account the four key components of an IT risk assessment:
- Threat
A threat in IT is anything that poses potential harm to your IT networks, assets, resources, and capabilities. A threat could be a breach such as corporate espionage, an event such as network downtime, an incident such as a fire, or even natural disasters and other calamities.
- Vulnerability
A vulnerability is an area or aspect of your IT network, assets, resources, or capabilities which have shown to have weak defenses against a potential threat or intrusion that can cause damage to your systems.
- Impact
Impact refers to the damage that your company or organization would suffer if the threat is able to breach the vulnerability of your IT network and infrastructure.
- Likelihood
Likelihood refers to the probability that an incident would enable a threat to breach your vulnerabilities and cause damage to your network.
To be able to make an honest-to-goodness assessment of your risk remediation capabilities, you should start with an IT risk assessment. Identify the various threats and vulnerabilities which continue to pose potential harm and damage to your IT network and infrastructure.
2. Identify Risk Remediation Capabilities To Be Improved
Based on your IT risk assessment, you’d also be able to identify which areas of your risk remediation capabilities can be further improved from your existing arrangements and capabilities.
You should prioritize the various assets that you have to protect from vulnerabilities to all kinds of potential threats. There are various kinds of assets, and this doesn’t only refer to physical hardware. Assets do include servers and computers. But confidential contact details and client information are also assets.
Other assets are sensitive documents shared by your partners and clients. If you have trade secrets or confidential proprietary software, applications, networks, or files, these are also considered assets. You have to sit down with your managers and probably with some of your leaders when you do your assessment of risk remediation capabilities.
Here are the various areas of remediation capabilities you should assess:
- Physical Security
The first area of risk remediation capabilities you assess are those you can see and hold. After having identified the physical threats as well as vulnerabilities of your IT network and infrastructure, you should conduct an assessment of your remediation capabilities to respond to potential physical threats such as floods and fires.
If your server rooms are located in the basement, you should reconsider moving them especially if you’re in a flood-prone county or city. Place fire extinguishers in the server room for emergencies. Remove anything that might break and fall on the servers in the event of an earthquake.
- Network Security
An important part of your risk assessment is looking into your risk remediation capabilities against potential threats or actual breaches of your IT network and infrastructure. You should look into the capabilities of your network to detect and combat any virus or malware intrusion. You should also look into the security protection of the sectors in your network which contain highly confidential and sensitive information.
Your risk remediation capabilities should include measures to isolate and seal these highly confidential and sensitive resources in the event of a critical and widespread breach of your network, infrastructure, assets, and resources.
- Policy And Administrative Controls
There’s not much to be improved in terms of your risk remediation capabilities for policy and administrative controls since most of these are preventive and not remediation measures.
But an example of what you can do is to brief your managers on typical red flag behaviors or incidents which should alert them that one of their users or workers might commit a breach of policy and administrative controls. Examples of these are when a user attempts to access confidential folders and files that are beyond the scope of resources needed for the worker’s job description or specification of tasks.
- Technical Security Controls
This is another area where you might be able to identify other areas of opportunity for further improvement. You might be able to further improve your risk remediation capabilities in terms of technical security. This refers to the various access controls and levels of permission that you allow the various resources and users in your network.
In terms of technical security, you can improve your risk remediation capabilities by upgrading your capability to monitor breaches by unauthorized personnel into sectors or servers of your network which contain highly confidential or sensitive folders, files, and information. You should integrate measures that’d trigger alarms to your network security monitoring staff in the event of intrusions or hacking into your confidential servers and folders.
Another possible improvement in technical security is by adding multiple authentication controls over access to highly sensitive and confidential folders and files in your network servers. If an unusual visitor is detected or an irregular access is granted, you should improve your technical security by setting up notifications to your network security monitoring team.
3. Monitor Implementation Of Improvement Measures
Once you’ve identified the various improvement measures that you can undertake in every area of your risk remediation capabilities, you should develop a risk reporting and monitoring plan for the implementation of your improvement measures.
This should include the various risk remediation capability improvement measures that you intend to implement. It should also include indicators that’d enable your network security monitoring team to measure the performance of these measures against your improvement goals and objectives.
Conclusion
Your efforts to improve the risk remediation capabilities of your company’s network infrastructure and security should start with an objective assessment of the existing risk remediation framework and capabilities. You’ll have to identify any gaps and vulnerabilities in the existing setup. You can then identify areas to further improve your risk remediation capabilities. From there, you can develop improvement measures and implement them using a monitoring and tracking plan.
Read more: 8 Ways Businesses Can Protect Their Data
