With a cyberattack occurring every 39 seconds, cybercrime is one of the fastest-growing crimes in the world. Companies now need to take action to make their cybersecurity infrastructure even better than before in order to protect their money and reputation. But first, they should learn about the impact that cybersecurity can have on a business.

In this post, we’ll highlight the need for cybersecurity for businesses, as well as some best practices to have strong cybersecurity infrastructure:

Importance of Cybersecurity for Businesses

Cybersecurity is a process of securing computer systems, networks, and software from cybersecurity threats, such as social engineering, phishing, malware, ransomware, DDoS attacks, cloud vulnerabilities, etc., which aim to access, change, or destroy sensitive data from a business or organization.

The significance of cybersecurity in the online sphere cannot be understated. Just one security breach can have disastrous consequences, resulting in loss of finances and customer trust.

Cybersecurity helps secure internal and external data from theft or loss. Furthermore, it can prevent financial losses from occurring due to data breaches. For instance, in 2023, the average cost of a data breach was $4.45 million, a 15% increase over three years.

Businesses can also avoid legal liability for data breaches, cyberattacks, and third-party claims and protect their reputation. Cybersecurity is playing a vital role in fighting the rise in cybercrime in endless ways, from encryption processes to intrusion detection systems.

Best Practices to Have Robust Cybersecurity Infrastructure

Staying safe from cyberattacks is pretty challenging, but there are still some tips that can help you defend your company against such attacks. Below are the best practices and methods for having a strong cybersecurity infrastructure:

Employee Education

The primary step is to invest in cybersecurity training for the workforce to protect against threats from within. Employee training should be conducted at least once a year.

Since employee negligence accounts for two-thirds of breaches, it is crucial that employees are educated on different ways malicious actors can infiltrate a system and be able to identify signs of data breaches. Employees should know how to stay safe while using the company’s network.

Strong Access Control

It is always better to limit employee access to systems and sensitive data to only specific departments in the organization. This will control the impact of data breaches and minimize the possibility of malicious actors within the company gaining access to data. Define a plan outlining which individuals have access to certain levels of information so that responsibilities and accountability are clear to all involved.

Updated Software and Systems

Keeping your systems and software updated is another cybersecurity best practice. It is common for providers to release new versions of their applications every now and then to introduce new features and functionalities, boost performance, and fix security vulnerabilities. Failure to install these updates in a timely manner may make your devices and systems vulnerable.

Strong Password Policies

Enforcing strong password policies is required to protect an organization’s network. A strong password should be 15 characters in length and contain a combination of lowercase and uppercase letters, digits, and symbols. Passwords should be changed at regular intervals.

Employees should also consider implementing multi-factor authentication that necessitates additional information besides a password. Password managers are useful for auto-generating and storing strong passwords on the user’s behalf.

Regular Cybersecurity Audits

Another good approach is to conduct regular cybersecurity audits as they establish criteria that companies and the workforce can use to assess if they are continuously defending against risks. Audits should be conducted once or twice a year at minimum. Cybersecurity audits aid businesses in keeping up with legal requirements.

Web Scraping

Web scraping can also contribute to a strong cybersecurity infrastructure, based on its implementation and uses. This process can be used to gather publicly available data on potential security threats or vulnerabilities from various sources to boost the company’s risk-handling capabilities.

The best approach to perform web scraping is through proxy servers. Proxies help users conceal their original address and access content on restricted sources. Dedicated datacenter proxies are the best option to perform web scraping and collect data related to security practices and threats.

Those who buy dedicated proxy servers can perform web scraping while masking their IP address and maintain anonymity. Businesses that buy dedicated proxy servers can scrape data on breaches or best practices specific to certain regions and plan their security policies accordingly.

Summary

Considering everything, companies can no longer ignore and undermine the importance of cybersecurity if they want to avoid security risks in the future.

So, it is important for companies to train their employees in security principles, safeguard information, devices, and networks from bad actors, make backup copies of important business data, control physical access to sensitive content, and perform data scraping with proxies to stay protected.