Businesses today rely on complex networks of data and software to keep up with the competition. These networks have become increasingly important, as remote working is expected to account for 25% of all professional jobs in America by the end of 2022.
That means it’s never been more important for your company to prevent network security threats. We’ve put together a five-step plan you can follow to make that happen.
Keep reading to learn more.
Table of Contents
1. Know Your Threats
The first step to creating a robust network security plan is understanding the threats that you need to combat. The most common attacks on businesses are:
- Malware – such as viruses, trojan horses, and spyware
- Phishing – the attaching of malicious links to communications like emails and social media messages
- Ransomware – software that locks networks down and demands a ransom payment to regain access
- DDoS attacks – flooding a network with traffic to make it unusable for legitimate users
Your network security plan will need to account for each of these common avenues of cyber attacks in order to be effective.
Understand What You’re Protecting
Alongside this, it’s also a good idea to make sure you explicitly recognize what you’re trying to protect from network security threats. This can vary from company to company but often includes:
- Confidential data
- Reputational damage
- Loss of revenue through network downtime
- Increased IT costs as a result of breaches
These are the major things that your network security plan should protect. It can be helpful to detail the specific strategies you’re using to safeguard each of them.
2. Monitor Network Activity
Next, you should work on implementing a plan to track network activity. That way, as soon as a malicious actor gains access to your network, you’ll know about it. Monitoring increases response times, which could be all that’s necessary to prevent an attack.
For example, a recent IBM report found that it takes businesses an average of 197 to identify a breach and 69 days to contain it. The simple act of monitoring things like user logs and locations could help you increase your response time tremendously.
3. Create and Enforce Security Policies
Most cyber-attacks occur when malicious actors gain access to employees’ legitimate credentials. If you can create and enforce strong security policies within your team, you reduce the risk of this happening considerably.
There are a few different aspects to this.
Best Employee Network Security Policies
First, make sure that employees have strong passwords. They should be at least 8 characters long and feature a mixture of capitalized letters, lowercase ones, numbers, and special symbols.
Second, consider mandating multifactor authentication. This means that an employee will need to confirm their login by receiving an SMS code, a code on an authorization app, an email, or some other independent system. One of the types of multi-factor authentication is two-factor authentication, which involves using two different methods to verify your identity. When you set up two factor authentication for an account, you’ll need to create an application-specific password for each device or application you want to be able to access your account. The advantage of using 2FA is that even if an attacker steals your password, they still can’t get into your account without also stealing your device.
Multifactor authentication adds another layer of security to your network. With it, a hacker would need to not just compromise your employee’s login information – but would also need to compromise another independent system of theirs to gain access to your network.
Make sure that employees are updating their software regularly, as well. New software updates will often contain patches for newly-discovered vulnerabilities. You want to make sure that your employees have these patches installed as quickly as possible to limit the potential of a breach.
Finally, it’s good practice to make sure that your employees use antivirus software as well. Even if your employees are using the best practices for network security, a malicious file could still find its way onto their computer without them noticing.
If an employee has antivirus software installed, that malicious file will be detected. And the software will prevent the employee from interacting with it in a way that could cause damage to your network.
4. Build Backups and Redundancies Into Your System
There’s a popular phrase in cyber security called a “single point of failure.” This describes a network that can be brought down entirely when a single aspect of it is compromised.
One of the main goals of your network security plan should be to avoid single points of failure as much as possible. That means backing up important data to unconnected networks and building redundancies into your system.
When you do this, a hacker can gain access to one component of your system, bring it down, and still not disrupt the flow of your business.
5. Consider Partnering with Experts
You may also want to consider partnering with external IT services – especially if you don’t have much of an internal IT department.
External experts can conduct a review of your network to make sure that there aren’t any lingering vulnerabilities in it. They can also assist with the monitoring of your network over time so that you can identify and respond to breaches quickly if any occur.
This can be very helpful because network security threats are constantly evolving. It can be difficult to keep up with them if you don’t have a dedicated team of experts working to make sure you remain safe.
