IT SECURITY THAT SAFEGUARDS YOUR BUSINESS.

Business cybersecurity describes the technologies, processes, and practices an organisation must have in place to protect themselves against cybersecurity breaches and attacks.

A strong business cybersecurity plan involves much more than just anti-virus software. At the very least, businesses should have a cyber incident response plan that clearly identifies an organisation’s process for identifying, defending against and recovering from cyberattacks. The aim of an efficient business cybersecurity strategy is to offset risk and limit damage.

Some of the common threats you need to protect your business against are:
- Ransomware (malicious software designed to deny access to your systems in exchange for a monetary payment)
- Adware (a computer virus that fills your computer with ads)
- Spyware (a type of cyber virus designed to spy on your business and its employees and pass that information to criminals)
- Phishing (where employees are sent an email that appears to come from a legitimate source but is intended to either enable malware installation or reveal sensitive information)
- Denial of Service Attacks (where systems, networks or servers are flooded with traffic, making them unable to fulfil legitimate requests)

Every day, more threats emerge. Having a robust business cyber security plan will offer protection against a range of existing and emerging threats. At the very least, you need to have an effective firewall, anti-virus, anti-spam, digital content filtration, cloud security, and endpoint security (for all devices).

The first step in making your business cyber secure is to hire a cyber security specialist who will review your existing infrastructure, processes and solutions. They will analyse your current vulnerabilities and provide you with a detailed report to demonstrate the strength of your existing solution if you have one.

As a rule of thumb, you should have all the following in place to make sure your business is cyber secure:
- Regular data backups of all your key systems and data (MS 365 does not do this for you).
- Apply operating system, web browser, and software security patches on an ongoing basis and keep up-to-date with updates. Many of these can be managed externally by an IT provider if you do not have the in-house capability.
- Install and regularly update anti-virus and anti-malware solutions
- Have a robust password policy with two-factor authentication
- Encrypt valuable and sensitive data.
- Make sure your firewall has the latest firmware installed and that it’s the best solution for your business.
- Encrypt your Wi-Fi.
- Make sure all employees use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) when accessing your systems on an unsecured network.

You should also introduce incident response planning. This involves regularly reviewing and testing your organisation’s ability to withstand unexpected threats, including new and emerging cyber-attacks.

At Agile Technical Solutions, we regularly simulate cyber-attacks for clients on their systems to stress-test their existing cyber security solution.

Cyber security is as essential to businesses as employees are.

On average, a cyber security breach in the UK costs a business nearly £1.5k. However, this figure becomes far greater as the size of the business increases.

Aside from the obvious financial fallout, there are the costs of loss of productivity and time spent managing the incident. After all, cyber-attacks often infiltrate all areas of a business.

If you think your business cyber security insurance will offer you cover for every eventuality, you could be wrong. The 2020 Sophos report reveals that one in five organisations have a major hole in their cybersecurity insurance. 84% of respondents said they have cybersecurity insurance, but only 64% have insurance covering ransomware.

Many companies do not have the in-house capability to successfully investigate and respond to a cyberattack or breach in-house. It can take a painful 3.4 days for larger businesses to get systems back up and running if their disaster recovery plan isn’t up to scratch.

Every business needs cyber security. Sadly, there’s not an individual or organisation that is not at risk when using technology. If you’re wondering what the business benefits to cyber security are, here’s a few things to consider:
- It protects your business. Cyber security services protect your data and systems and ensure your employees are not at risk from cyber threats such as malware and phishing (to name just a couple).
- Protect your clients. By protecting your business and client data from cyber threats, you not only meet your GDPR responsibilities but protect your customers who might otherwise suffer from the fallout of a cyber-attack.
- Keeps you operational. This is a big benefit. Ransomware, for instance, can put a complete stop to a business. Likewise, if you are heavily reliant on your website, a potential cyber breach could be hugely disruptive and damaging.
- Keeps systems in good working order. Viruses can quickly slow your systems down and even make working completely impossible. Having an effective cyber security strategy prevents this from happening, with many threats thwarted at the perimeter.

There are several different types of IT security. These typically fall into three different categories, including:
- Internet/Network Security (for accessing internal and external resources using LAN or WAN)
- Cloud Security (for applications or services hosted within the cloud)
- Endpoint Security (for devices such as Laptops, Phones, etc.)

Securing remote workers. With flexible working excepted by today’s employees, protecting the devices they use when they are away from your corporate IT network is crucial. Data encryption IT Security solutions ensure that any data stored on a device – including email data and data that synchronises to the Cloud – is unreachable by a potential attacker.

Network Security. The IT network is the lifeblood of any business and the main form of connection to the outside world. With more business systems hosting their data online, cloud security is vital. The need for a secure and stable internet connection through Unified Threat Management (UTM) devices is crucial. Sonic Wall and Sophos XG are just two of the industry-leading next-generation hardware firewall solutions Agile Technical Solutions deploys.

Unified Threat Management. Unified Threat Management devices (UTM) and Malware endpoint anti-virus protection solutions are effective IT security solutions used to combat Encrypto viruses and Ransomware. Essentially, UTM devices bring all your network IT security features into one place. As well as a firewall, VPS and IPS, a UTM will support network or cloud-based threat management.

Web Filtering. As a proactive IT security tool, SPAM filtering systems are a very effective cyber security option. After all, SPAM is often the starting point for cyber-crime. Best practice is to have a SPAM filtering product with an Advanced Threat Management (ATP) add-on. This is something that is still a relatively new product in the IT security threat management marketplace, which very few SPAM filtering systems currently look at. This helps to reduce the threats specific to staff members being targeted for money transfer fraud and email spoofing and is something that Agile Technical Solutions has a vast amount of knowledge on.