Cybersecurity deals with techniques employed to protect system, infrastructure and data. It consists of all the processes, technology and measures designed to prevent cybercrime. Core elements of cybersecurity include Information Security, Application Security, Operational Security, Network Security, Database Security, Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity plan and most important is end user awareness.
Security risks are evolving rapidly and hackers employ newer techniques to break through the system. It is essential for every organization to employ preventive and proactive methods to handle cybersecurity. Weak cybersecurity plans can have severe repercussions on the overall reputation of the organization.
Cyber criminals use variety of malwares, ransomwares and hacking techniques to intrude into organization’s environment. It is extremely crucial to be abreast with the latest security outbreaks and have regular health and vulnerability check for your systems.
Why choose Cybersecurity for your business?
Knowing the negative impacts cyber-attacks, it is important to employ effective cybersecurity practices in every organization.
Some of the reasons to choose cybersecurity for your business are-
- Reputation: Cybercrime can expose your personal and confidential data to the outside world. Along with risk of exposing sensitive information this can also hamper the reputation of an organization to a great extent.
- Unknown Vulnerability: Security scans such as vulnerability detection, application static code scan, penetration testing helps organizations to evaluate vulnerabilities which are unknown. This helps in proactively fixing these vulnerability issues and creating robust infrastructure.
- Organizational Policies: While evaluating cybersecurity threats, organizations have to tighten several policies and infrastructure usage. This helps in aligning organizational policies based on security. Organizations can address this by incorporating several globally accepted compliance standards such as ISO, NIST etc.
- Heavy cost impact: Based on the level of cyber-attack and security breach, an organization can face legal consequences. This not only impacts the market face of the organization but also amounts to incurring heavy expenses.
- Customer Trust: A security breach can impact the credibility of the organization and have negative market value amongst its customers. Effective implementation of cybersecurity protocols helps build customer trust.
- Competitor advantage: Having cybersecurity controls in place improves market value as well as adds advantage over competitors. An organization having restrictive security controls and well managed cybersecurity protocols can incorporate changes faster and securely
- Complex Solutions: Many a times, even bigger organizations fail to bounce back to normal activities post a security breach. The solutions to be implemented post a cyber-attack are usually complex and cannot be implemented immediately. Failing to implement can cause threat of being re-attacked.
- Protection: Prevents data theft and protects against virus, malwares, spywares and other unwanted programs. Cybersecurity prevents system damage and sudden crashes thereby ensuring smooth running of the systems.
Some facts about Cybersecurity:
Cyberattacks can be caused due to multiple reasons. The top most reason being not having updated software. Zero day attacks are common and usually end up in the vendor hurrying to fix the vulnerability.
Several top companies, government websites, hospitals worldwide have been victims to security breach. Social Media is the most used channel of attacks and has reported attacks such as Like-jacking, Link-jacking, phishing attacks, spams and social engineering.
In the past, 68% of funds lost due to cyber-attacks were declared unrecoverable. Average time to detect and rectify a malicious activity or security breach is about 170 days. Estimated global cost of cyber-attacks annually is around $400 billion.
Future of Cybersecurity:
Newer technologies such as cloud, bring your own device -BYOD have increased cyber threats. It has become extremely crucial for organizations to employ cyber experts and ethical hackers. Cyber theft is ever increasing and is growing. Many organizations have proactively started to follow best practises such as –
- Mandatory application and infrastructure penetration testing
- Application code scan for vulnerability detection using static scan like Veracode
- Employing Cyber Security experts who are qualified to deal with cybercrime
- Employing professional and certified ethical hackers
- Constant monitoring of network for malicious activity. Employing network administrator and certified professionals to trace network activities.
Cybersecurity is a booming industry of recent times. A lot of efforts are being made by all levels of organizations to protect against security breach. Stats show that there are around 1 million cyber security jobs available as of 2016 and this is estimated to increase and reach up to 1.5 million by 2019.
Over the next five years, cybersecurity expenditure alone is likely to exceed $1 trillion from 2017 to 2021. With a lot of new technologies hitting the market, cybercrime is ever increasing and hackers are constantly looking for newer ways to hack systems. Organizations understand the importance of cybersecurity and hence are willing to run the extra mile to achieve complete system security.
