‘Just get started’: how focusing on these 4 key pillars can set up the foundation of your cybersecurity success
“A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.”
It’s an old adage, one we’ve all heard a million times, but there’s a reason it has staying power. It’s because it’s just as applicable to your business’s cybersecurity journey as it is any other kind of long-haul trek, literal, figurative, or otherwise.
And if you know anything about SUCCESS, it’s that we firmly adhere to the idea that cybersecurity is just that: an ongoing journey.
“That’s the key there, that’s why we’re very different from our competition,” explains Brandon Nohr, SUCCESS’s Chief Technology Officer. “They want you to buy the blinking-lights box and put it in the corner and call it security. We want you to buy into the foundation and the journey, and just get started.”
Still, Nohr knows that for those not immersed in cybersecurity issues on the daily, even knowing where to start can be overwhelming, especially for the business owner constantly pulled in so many directions. That’s why he’s broken down the fundamental cybersecurity basics into four key pillars.
“It’s not designed as this comprehensive solution, but rather—how do you even start to think about this stuff?” Nohr says. “It’s the foundation.”
If you’re feeling like you don’t even know where to begin, take a look at these four key components, and know that partnering with SUCCESS means you’ll never have to be on this cybersecurity journey without a roadmap.
Inside the Four Walls
When we think about cybersecurity “inside the four walls,” what we’re talking about is all the very necessary (but on their own, insufficient, which we’ll get to in a minute), basic elements of cybersecurity, like firewalls, anti-virus software, and OS basics.
This is a great place to start, but Nohr points out that when it comes to your cybersecurity, SUCCESS wants to help you move the needle from a place of “hope” to a place of “know.”
While you can hope that your network won’t come under attack, the added insight that SUCCESS can offer through its myriad in-house security experts can help you rest assured that your cybersecurity is in the hands of team that knows what it is doing, and can detect bad actors before they get too far.
Outside the Four Walls
“Historically you’ve protected your building, your company, your digital assets within those four walls, and not a lot of people have thought about outside of those four walls,” Nohr says. “And now we’re a year into this drastic change in moving outside the four walls—what kind of visibility and insight do you have into everything?”
This is something so many business owners have had to consider in a whole new way over the past few years, as working remotely—away from the traditional four walls of the office and the network’s firewall becomes more popular.
Still, most of the same best cybersecurity practices apply outside the four walls of the office, just as they do inside—and with SUCCESS, that means something like the expensive, time-consuming difference between having to take care of a data breach after the fact, versus preemptively stopping malicious attackers in their tracks. By following the principles of “equal citizenship,” SUCCESS’s monitoring tools offer insight into devices and user behavior regardless of whether or not a person is inside the office, or out.
“When you think about SUCCESS’s Network Watch Secure product line, it takes the goodness that we’ve learned inside the four walls and applies it to the software and machines that allows us to have that visibility and insight outside of the four walls,” Nohr says.
Identity Management
While identity management may seem beyond basic, SUCCESS elevates the use of this tactic by focusing not just on the basics, but on closely keeping tabs on unusual behaviors within your network.
“We’re thinking about behavioral analytics, such as: when a bad actor gets into a network, they usually do certain things, like move laterally, elevate certain privileges,” Nohr explains. “From an identity perspective, we’re looking for those behaviors. And it doesn’t require anti-virus software and having that linked up to signatures and all this technical stuff. It’s just looking for that behavior and alerting on it.”
The User
This is one of the first-line defenses for many services, and one that often gets overlooked, Nohr says.
Essentially, the “user” pillar of these basics of cybersecurity is all about enabling your team to make smart choices about cybersecurity every day, through training, testing, and monitoring.
“Those are really the three components: how do I want them to behave, how do I want them to act securely, and then monitor,” Nohr explains.
SUCCESS can work with you and your team through trainings, and then put that training to the test with phishing email testing and the like—part of a regular cycle of training, testing, and monitoring to help your staff stay sharp when it comes to all elements of cybersecurity.
Overall, while cybersecurity does need to be an ongoing, evolving process to be truly effective, getting started with these four components will give you a firm foundation, moving you from hope to know, and from the basics to security maturity.
“Our foundation allows you to start the journey,” Nohr says. And it’s not the end-all be-all, but it’s the foundation to build your security maturity on.”