Coffee corner: Staying ahead of IT security threats with Chris King, VP Sales
Written by: Chris King, Vice President & Partner
Business leaders across all industries now realize that we are in new era of cyber security risk. Today, it is understood that it’s no longer a matter of if you will be compromised, but when you will be compromised. IX Solutions has been working with leadership groups across its customer base to increase awareness, understand the current threat landscape, and to identify security gaps.
We're having regular discussions with business leaders around:
The evolving threat landscape and increased risk of having a mobile workforce and BYOD approach to devices
The challenge of having insufficiently trained internal resources to develop a culture of security awareness
Lack of time to properly implement security solutions that mitigate risk
The risk of having a corporate mindset that security is the IT department's job alone
Lack of a well defined security focus across the organization
Our customers realize that a multi-faceted approach is needed to address these challenges. Leadership and executive buy-in is the key ingredient. However, modern security tools and education can round out your mitigation strategy. Many IX Solutions customers leverage the Microsoft 365 software suite for productivity and management. This suite also includes advanced security solutions that, when enabled, can significantly reduce the likelihood of your organization falling victim to malicious activity.
Staying ahead of evolving IT security threats
Multi-Factor Authentication
We often find ourselves looking for easy to implement, high value mitigation tools when starting a security-focused roadmap. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) provides a means to virtually eliminate the risk of your user accounts being compromised via phishing, brute force attack, and social engineering. Using conditional access policies, your users do not get bothered by ongoing multi-factor authentication prompts when they access company resources. Instead, MFA is only triggered when uncommon login events occur such as a trying to access resources from another country.
Phishing Awareness and Training
Phishing campaign awareness and training is another valuable tool in your organizations security strategy. Educating your users on how to identify and report potential phishing attempts can protect your critical data and reduce the likelihood of compromise.
Using advanced technology, you can periodically send employees fake phishing emails to test their ability to detect them. When they accidentally fall for a fake phishing email, they are directed to training material which makes them more likely to detect it the next time. With this approach, your business can report on the ongoing progress of your phishing awareness training, allowing you to identify gaps and work with individuals and groups to further enhance your security posture and reduce risk to the organization.
While cyber security incidents may not be entirely avoidable, our security conscious customers are taking significant steps to improve their security posture by implementing the programs and solutions described in this article. By aligning proven best practices and establishing governance at the leadership level, these businesses are well positioned to map security initiatives to their business goals.
