Protect Your Assets

Once you have identified your “crown jewels” and critical assets, build your cyber protections around these first as you create a trajectory forward to protect your entire businesses. Ultimately, your goal is to build a culture of cybersecurity that includes employees knowing how to protect themselves and the business and understanding the cyber risks as your business grow or adds new technologies or functions.

Protections will include:

  • implementing cyber protections on core assets
  • implementing basic cyber hygiene practices across the business

Now that you know the assets of your organization, it is important to implement protections. While the what you need to do will be based on your assets, protections may include:

  • Locking down logins: Using stronger authentication to protect access to accounts and ensure only those with permission can access them. This can also include enforcing strong passwords.
  • Backing up data: putting in place a system–either in the cloud or via separate hard drive storage–that make electronic copies of the key information on a regular basis.
  • Maintaining security of devices over time: This includes knowing that software patches and updates are done in a timely fashion.
  • Limiting access to the data or the system only to those who require it.
  • Backing up their work: Whether you set your employees’ computers to back up automatically or ask that they do it themselves, employees should be instructed on their role in protecting their work.

A good backup is the last resort to protecting data.  It allows you to recover with minimal data loss and get your business productive again.