What Are Your IT Security Requirements? Do You Know? (Requirements/Solutions)

Do you know whether your business’s IT security requirements are being met? With the rising number of cyber thefts in Atlanta, numerous lawsuits have been filed against organizations. And, cybersecurity threats are multiplying in frequency, complexity, and severity. Your customers expect that you will take sufficient action to prevent data theft. This is just one reason why you must know what your IT Security Requirements are.

Are You Aware Of These 3 Common IT Security Requirements?

To help you determine your requirements, consider these 3 Requirements that most businesses must meet:

1. Business

2. Regulatory

3. Customer

Now… Let’s break these down further to determine what IT solutions you must implement to meet these IT Security Requirements.

1. What Are Business IT Security Requirements?

You must ensure that you’re doing everything you can to keep your business information secure. Your Technology Service Provider can help you put security solutions in place such as:

Data Protection: It’s essential to establish an Information Security Policy (ISP). This is a set of rules to ensure that your users or networks adhere to a standard that ensures the security of data stored digitally. It governs the protection of your information technology.

An ISP has three main objectives:

1. The confidentiality of data and information assets and to confine access to only those who are authorized.
2. The integrity of data to keep it intact, complete and accurate, and to keep IT systems running reliably.
3. The availability so data or IT systems are accessible to authorized users when required.

The Policy can be as broad as you need it to be but should consider these key elements:

• Identify a general approach to data security.
• Denote the steps needed to detect and prevent compromising of data and IT infrastructures including misuse of information technology, networks, computer systems and applications.
• How to protect the reputation of your business with respect to its legal and ethical responsibilities.
• To provide effective mechanisms to respond to complaints, questions and concerns about non-compliance with the Information Security Policy.

Business Continuity: This is also referred to as disaster recovery. It’s a security plan to ensure that your business can continue operating even after it’s hit by a significant disaster (whether it’s a natural disaster or a human-caused disaster).

Your IT Service Provider will map out a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) and devise strategies to ensure your business continuity. Your Plan should:

• Protect your IT System from significant disruptions.
• Get your business back up and running quickly in the event of a disaster.
• Test your backups and recovery regularly as part of routine site maintenance.
• Perform backups hourly to a remote location without human intervention–with logging and alerting that notifies about not just failures but on the absence of success–a fundamental distinction.
• Recover files and complete systems for time periods going back days, weeks and months.

Deep Scan IT Audits: This annual or quarterly analysis includes deep-level scans, vulnerability testing and reporting to accurately identify what is working as well as any security gaps. It identifies the effectiveness of IT solutions. Based on the results, actions will be put in place to improve, change or maintain IT security solutions.

Deep Scan IT Audits can also ensure that your IT provider’s remote management and monitoring (RMM) systems are working effectively (which you also need for ongoing monitoring of cyber threats). For instance, if you add a new computer to your network, a network assessment scan will flag the latest addition so the RMM tool will monitor it.

Dark Web Monitoring to detect your compromised credentials that surface on the Dark Web in real-time. You’ll receive initial and ongoing scanning, with continuous monitoring and alerts if anything relating to your business is found. If so, you’ll be advised to invalidate it immediately. This means changing your account numbers, email addresses, passwords and anything related to the stolen data.

End-User Security Training: A Security Awareness Program must be put in place to raise the overall information security awareness of your employees to ensure that privacy and security issues are mitigated.

Simulated Phishing Campaigns will test your employees to see if they’ve been paying attention.

This can let you know which employees are more likely to fall for a phishing scam. Security Awareness Training helps your employees know how to recognize and avoid being victimized by phishing emails and scam websites. They learn how to handle security incidents when they occur. Your employees are informed about what to watch for, how to block attempts and where they can turn for help.

Once users understand that they will be tested regularly and that there are repercussions for repeated failures, their behavior changes. They develop a less trusting attitude and get much better at spotting a scam email, which increases your IT security.

2. What Regulatory Requirements Should We Be Aware Of?

These are requirements for legal, industry or governmental compliance, or contractual obligations that IT security must fulfill. For example, organizations in the healthcare industry must be HIPAA compliant.

When regulators perform a Compliancy Audit, they are provided specific guidelines and instructions on the aspects they should look for. One aspect is the security of your IT infrastructure and procedures. Your IT Service Provider will determine if your technology is secure and pass these audits.

They’ll provide a thorough examination and evaluation of your technology infrastructure, operations, and policies to determine whether you have the proper IT controls in place to meet regulatory requirements.

They will also consider both solutions and strategies that could improve your security posture. It will include a risk assessment to determine if your IT infrastructure is vulnerable to security breaches like:

• Unauthorized access.
• Data breaches.
• Computer viruses and malware.
• Email hacking and spamming.
• Accidental deletions and human error.

3. How Do We Know If We Meet IT Security Requirement For Our Customers?

Whether you work in a B2B or B2C environment, your customers expect their data and your systems will be protected. Your customers assume that you are doing everything you can to protect their confidential information. For example, the customer may require that all their confidential files be encrypted.

To protect your customers, you must know their security requirements. Must they meet best practices or industry/government standards like ISO 27001 or HIPAA? If so, as a business associate for a covered entity do you also comply with HIPAA?

Compliance & Identity Access Management Services should be included if you must meet security requirements to protect customers’ data like HIPAA, PCI-DSS, FINRA, GDPR, or others. Identity and Access Management Services will also help you comply with security and regulatory requirements. It ensures only authorized individuals can access your customers’ confidential information and that of your customers’ privacy rights are complied with.

What’s The Bottom Line When It Comes To IT Security Requirements?

With the help of the right Technology Service Provider in Atlanta, you can determine your IT Security Requirements and ensure that you meet them. Your IT provider can help you determine this and perform Deep Scan IT Audits, Dark Web Monitoring, and IT Security Training and Testing to verify that your systems and data are thoroughly protected against cyber threats, data breaches and IT security gaps.

Don’t take chances with the security of your data. To stay up to date on these and other IT topics, visit our Blog.

FBI Warns Businesses Of Cyber Attack From China

Sextortion Scam Pretending To Come From Your Hacked Email Account

What’s PhishPoint? (Insights/Questions/Answers)