This blog from Celerity discusses how IT managers can stay on top of your organisation’s security and become more informed about cybersecurity defences.
In today’s digital world, new risks come up every hour of every day. Simply connecting to the internet creates the opportunity for a hacker to target your organisation. Due to the exponential increase in cybercrime, cyber defence is becoming a prime focus for governments and organisations all over the globe.
However, many organisations often don’t have the budget to onboard a security operations team or to bring in cybersecurity specialists. Thus, cybersecurity often ends up becoming part of an IT manager’s job. This can have serious consequences as IT managers often don’t have the experience to defend against cyberattacks or don’t have the necessary training needed to manage security tools.
Moreover, some IT managers have insufficient knowledge of the overall security strategy, which massively increases their workload, causing them to make mistakes and distracts them from day-to-day IT management tasks that are essential for the business.
In this article, we will explore some ways of how an IT manager can effectively take up the role of a security manager and how managed cyber security services can facilitate them.
1. USE CYBERSECURITY FRAMEWORKS
A cybersecurity framework serves as a system of guidelines, standards, and best practices to manage risks that occur in a digital world. It prioritises a repeatable, flexible, and cost-effective approach to promote the protection and resilience of your business.
The IT managers in your company can use cyber security frameworks to align controls such as offline, local, and cloud backups to boost resilience from any attack or dependence on hardware.
One such framework that you can use to better manage and minimise cyber security risk is the NIST framework. This particular framework is a set of processes that helps your team measure the maturity of the existing cyber security and risk management systems and identify ways to fortify them. The NIST framework can be immensely valuable for multiple reasons, such as:
- It’s easy to use and understand.
- It’s customisable – you can prioritise the tasks that will help them strengthen the company’s security systems.
- It’s risk-based – it helps you determine which assets are at the highest risk and take steps to secure them first.
2. CONSULT AN EXPERIENCED IT MANAGED SERVICES PROVIDER
The next way to facilitate the transition from an IT manager to a Security manager is to consult an experienced IT managed services provider.
Here an experienced IT managed services provider will come in and perform a detailed security assessment of a company’s network and identify real-world and potential vulnerabilities. These professionals can help IT managers to find the security holes and then fix them.
3. HIRE A MANAGED CYBER SECURITY SERVICES PROVIDER
A managed cyber security services provider offers outsourced monitoring and management of security systems and devices. Some of the common services they offer include Security Incident Event Management (SIEM) threat detection, vulnerability management, managed firewall, simulated phishing, and patch management. They can take some of the work off of IT manager’s plates so that they can effectively focus on other IT management tasks.
LAST FEW WORDS
Cyber security should be one of your company’s top priorities. If you are unable to create and implement effective cybersecurity measures, you should use the steps highlighted above and hire a managed cyber security services provider to offload some of the heavy lifting.