Recommendations For Making A Cybersecurity Plan

1. Analyze your current situation

Understanding and identifying your position as a company in cybersecurity is the first step to start with the plan. An excellent practice is to carry out a risk analysis. In this way, you will be able to identify how vulnerable your company is and what risks you may face.

Some questions that you should be clear about when carrying out your risk analysis are the following:

• What processes can be more critical, and what are your most valuable assets?

• In the event of an incident or attack, how many processes can you count on to continue working?

• What data does your company handle and what is in circulation?

• How is your data transmitted from source to end?

• Where is the data being stored?

• Where are the uncontrolled accesses to your network?

• How important is the data for the company or your customers?

• Who handles the company's most sensitive information?

For this phase, you can rely on internal or external auditors to help you identify any possible threat and establish an action plan.

2. Form a team of Detection and Response against cyber attacks

Evaluating the formation of an Incident Response Team - ERI, CSIRT, SOC, or MDR according to your needs, business strategy and budget will help you guarantee the detection and response of threats and the management of cybersecurity incidents in your cloud services, emails, endpoints, networks, servers, workstations, etc.

3. Implement cybersecurity policies and culture in the company

Typically, cybersecurity in companies is carried out by the IT areas, and, in the best of cases, there are already areas explicitly created to handle these issues. But a prevalent mistake is to think that cybersecurity is the sole responsibility of these areas.

You can create cybersecurity policies to reinforce the following areas:

• Use of solid passwords and renewal of the same periodically.

• Manage user privilege levels.

• Use of mobile devices.

• Safe surfing on the net.

• Correct data storage.

• Access control.

• OS updates and security patches.

• Use of email.

• Pentesting.

• Vulnerability Analysis.

• Cybersecurity training etc.

4. Implement an ISMS: Information Security Management System

The implementation of an ISMS is a strategic decision for your company. Information is a valuable asset on which the proper functioning of an organization depends, and maintaining its integrity, confidentiality, and availability is essential to achieving business objectives.

Some of the benefits of ISMS are the following:

Reduce threats to a level of risk acceptable to the organization. So if an incident occurs, the damage is minimized, and business continuity is ensured.

Ricoh Danielson is an Information Security and Digital Forensics professional with over 15 years of progressive experience managing Incident Response and Digital Forensic matters across a diverse group of domestic and international clients.

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