Protect what’s critical to your organization. Whether customer information, reputation, or in-house data, you want to make sure what you need for proper operation is protected. We have years of experience helping our clients identify risks and take steps to address them. Don’t be caught unprotected, the damage can be catastrophic.
Accidents Happen Too
Security is the art of protecting yourself against malicious AND accidental damage. Ensuring you’re protected from accidents is sometimes overlooked in the worry about intruders. Many of the same systems and procedures that protect from accidents also limit intruders.
Stages of Security
Identification
Identification comes down to a few overall tasks:
- Identify what you want to protect
- Identify the likely accidents and attacks to those items
- Determine what you want to specifically allow and accomplish
- Determine who you want to allow and accomplish those actions
Once you’ve got this information, you can start to build a system to protect the assets you want to protect while allowing the actions you need.
Prevention
Implementing systems and procedures that stop the identified attacks and accidents from happening to protected resources yet allowing your people to get the work they need done. Implementing general “Good Security” guidelines will help you prevent some threats you might not have identified previously. Establishing good procedures and educating the users of your systems prevents many of the common attacks and accidents from happening. Systems to properly identify users and restrict what they are allowed to do are critical to keeping users and intruders out of areas they shouldn’t be in.
Detection
Detecting unauthorized access or unintended damage is critical to reacting to it. There is a large toolkit for detecting damage or breaches, a few include:
- log checking
- change tracking
- network monitoring
- network honeypots
- error detection
Merely detecting the problem, however, is just the start. You also need to present that information in a timely manner to personnel in a way appropriate to the severity of the issue.
Limitation
Limiting the amount of damage an intruder or accident can do once they have access speeds recovery. Some security professionals call this reaction but it can be more than just a reaction. There are procedures and policies that can be in place that limit damage even for events that are not detected. There are several ways to limit damage. From basic security implementations such as proper file system access permissions and encrypting of data to more sophisticated procedures as timed authentication and automatic triggers, several tools allow the modern IT infrastructure to reduce the damage a breach or accident can cause.
Recovery
Once damage happens, whether by intrusion or accident, how fast and how well you recover from it will often measure the impact to your organization. Careful planning and preparation will determine how well you handle breaches and accidents. The systems used after the damage is done must be in place well before and tested periodically. You need to know you can count on them to recover from damage.
Our Role
Advanced Reality has experience in every step of the security process from threat identification to policy and procedure creation to implementation of tools and systems. If you’re worried about your security and would like some suggestions or just want a review from a different perspective, contact us and let’s talk protection.