Basic Security Hygiene
Viruses have been keeping not only the physical world, but also the digital world in their grip for a while now. They have dramatically changed the way we work and made us introduce new technologies, greater security perimeters and thus less control. It will not surprise you that remote working has caused a peak in the number of cyberattacks, up by 400%!
The answer to cybercrime? Not vaccines, but common sense. We call it Basic Security Hygiene, and it all starts with a Security Audit.
What is a security audit?
A security audit is a systematic evaluation of your IT infrastructure. It evaluates the security of your IT systems and weighs them against an audit checklist of industry best practices, industry standards and/or federal regulations.
What does a security audit evaluates?
A well-founded security audit evaluates your security posture on several levels:
System Hardening
Get your basics right - At this level, verification is made whether all applications, systems and IT infrastructure are compliant and adequately configured. And whether they have been recently updated and patched.
Network Architecture
Intended to improve your network design, increase its performance and reliability, and provide redundancy. This means looking at both information flows within the company through various points, but also flows that can be linked externally back to the organization.
Physical Security
Evaluate the physical components of your IT systems and the environment in which these systems are located. This is where an evaluation is made of the security measurements your company has already taken to provide you in a later phase with a detailed security roadmap.
Organizational Security
At this level, both the security of and the various business processes that are related to information flows are analyzed (physical, digital, on-premise, cloud, etc). For example: How do employees collect, share, and store sensitive or non-sensitive data? How are accounts or access to the office secured?
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Why does my company need a security audit
A security audit allows you to detect the holes in your security posture. It helps you to protect your business critical data and to set up a cybersecurity strategy.
For many companies, it is the start of a thorough security policy that every employee in the company needs to follow. Not only your IT team is responsible for your IT infrastructure, all employees need to do their part.
Conducting repeated audits ensures that everyone in your company stays sharp and attentive to rogue cyber practices.
There are several reasons why you might want to conduct a security audit, so we'll just list it in a checklist:
Cybersecurity investments
- Identifying security gaps and weaknesses in (the configuration of) your IT infrastructure
- As a company, you want to improve your cybersecurity posture but don't know where to start. A security audit offers you a starting point and a vision for the future with a security roadmap.
- You want a benchmark to see progress in your security strategy, posture or policy. If you regularly perform a security audit, you can, over time, more easily calculate the return on investment of the extra layers of security you add.
- When your company has just been the victim of a hack or data breach.
Business critical
- To align business processes and security measures. Many extra layers of security on your IT infrastructure can make a lot of business processes much more heavy and time-consuming than they should be.
- To be compliant with any other external or internal regulations that your company wishes to meet.
- To identify unnecessary resources (money, time, manpower, etc.)
- If your company handles a lot of sensitive or business critical data.
- When you want to perform a system upgrade or data migration.
- When you are a company in full expansion. More employees often equals more IT systems, which in turn equals more data breach risks.
Cyber awareness creation
- To determine whether the employees of your company need security training.
- To make management aware of the risks related to the use and abuse of IT.
In need of a security audit?
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