Cybercriminals spend all of their time finding new ways to get around your defenses, penetrate your network, and steal your data. Thankfully, you don’t have to spend every day on the defensive to stop data breaches, but you do have to take regular action to keep up with evolving attacks.
To find out where you need to focus your attention and resources to keep your business safe, you must conduct regularly scheduled cybersecurity risk assessments, ideally at the beginning of the new year and at midyear.
Let’s take a look at the specific reasons how a midyear cybersecurity audit keeps you protected and some guidelines on how to conduct an effective one.
Why a midyear cybersecurity assessment? Isn’t one a year enough?
Cybercrime is a growing industry despite the efforts of the cybersecurity sector, with many reports showing that most small businesses are targeted by an attack at least once a year.
A cybersecurity risk assessment includes:
- Checking if your cybersecurity posture is up to standards
- Determining which threats currently pose the greatest risks
- Testing the performance of your cyber defenses and employee response
- Reassessing and updating your cybersecurity posture in the face of new threat information
Doing this just once a year is no longer enough. The threatscape changes, and new kinds of attacks are discovered all the time. So, what can adding an additional cybersecurity audit at the midyear point do for you?
Better patch and upgrade management
Cybersecurity, software, and hardware companies find vulnerabilities in their products all the time, which can be exploited by cybercriminals to carry out attacks. These vendors fix vulnerabilities as fast as they find them, but for these fixes to benefit you, you must implement patches and updates as soon as they are released.
A cybersecurity assessment checks if your software and firmware have the latest security updates and vulnerability fixes, and ensures they are compatible. Going a full year without an update check leaves you open for far too long.
The best time to test your cybersecurity response
It’s not realistic to expect that you can prevent 100% of cyberattacks all the time, but you can plan your team’s response to mitigate the attack’s damage. Your incident response plan should be detailed and regularly tested to ensure your team knows what to do when the time comes.
Testing your cybersecurity response plan at the midyear point enables you to see what your organization has learned so far this year and implement the newest updates to your cybersecurity posture.
Keeping your organization safe from compliance penalties
Just about every business is required to comply with cybersecurity regulations of some kind, and these rules are frequently updated to stay current with evolving threats. These updates may require you to change how you:
- Protect your network
- Handle customer data
- Encrypt communications
- Perform financial transactions
- Utilize the cloud
- Implement physical security measures
If your cybersecurity measures don’t meet the new standards, you’ll face fines and other penalties when you are audited, and ignorance is not an excuse. A midyear cybersecurity assessment gives you the best opportunity to check for compliance updates and make the required changes.
Reduce cybersecurity costs
A cybersecurity assessment includes auditing your software to check adoption and usage rates to determine if these products are actually doing anything for you. So, not only can this assessment prevent costly cyberattacks, but it can also find and eliminate waste and unnecessary expenses.
Maximize Your Benefits by Leaving the Assessments to the Experts
A full, detailed risk assessment that provides the maximum benefit for your cybersecurity posture requires deep industry knowledge and expertise. By outsourcing these audits to the IT specialists at XBASE, you get the best possible result and save your team’s valuable time and resources.
Contact XBASE to conduct your midyear cybersecurity assessment, and our expert consultants will provide the actionable information you need to keep your business safe and your costs under control.