Your business's IT system holds a lot more than just accounts. Customer information, bank information, product and research data, supplier agreements, quotes and costs are all vital information assets that your business needs to secure from all kinds of dangers.

A lot of these dangers are external with a mixture of criminal gangs and misguided individuals across the world trying to get past the front door of every business with various exploits and these get smarter everyday. Then there are the threats inside your business, such as poor security setup, no classification and lockdown of sensitive information and media, no monitoring of IT usage, or no recovery planning in place when something does go wrong. Then sometimes they are sitting right next to you with employees who don't understand the importance or not opening that email from the bank you are not a customer of or a courier you are not expecting a delivery from and these are the employees who are not disgruntled walking away with your hard earned information on a USB stick.

Regardless you need a security strategy in place that is easy to implement, monitor and change, a strategy that can adapt to the latest threats regardless of where it comes from and starts with a number of general IT security principles.

Actions to Strengthen Your First-Line Defense

Firewalls and antivirus (AV) are not enough (Defense in Depth): The threat landscape has changed greatly in the last five years, and firewalls and AV are simply no longer adequate as standalone protection against advanced attacks. Today, businesses need many layers of defense to truly protect themselves from evasive threats, including intrusion prevention services, web security solutions, reputation services, application control and more.

Don't just lock down incoming traffic; restrict outgoing as well: Most security professionals focus on restricting outside (Internet-based) traffic from getting into their network. However, businesses should spend time considering restricting the outgoing traffic as well. If you limit what your users can do online to what's absolutely necessary for business, you can often prevent employees from accidentally stumbling on cyber landmines, protect your business assets and you might even prevent malicious software from calling home to its attacker.

Today, you need Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) protection: Advanced threat actors have become extremely sophisticated and regularly create evasive malware designed to get past signature-based AV solutions. This means someone has to find the malware before you have a signature to protect against it. APT solutions detonate potential malware and use behaviors to immediately identify previously unknown, zero-day malware. If you rely only on AV protection, you could consider yourself infected.

Train staff to identify and report spear phishing attempts: Spear phishing is one of the most common advanced attack techniques. Rather than sending an obviously suspicious email, sophisticated actors study their victims intimately and send very targeted and much more believable emails. Train employees on the existence of spear phishing and warn them to remain suspicious of any email with a link or document attachment, even if it seems to come from a co-worker.

Use reputation-based security services and threat intelligence: Today, malware delivery is very dynamic and moves at the speed of light. Security organizations have launched information-sharing reputation services to give security controls up-to-the-minute information on what might be a bad site. Make sure your security arsenal includes controls that leverage reputation services.

IT Security Reviews & Consultancy

As you can see from the points above, security is not just about buying a product and assuming you are covered. Security needs to become part of your everyday IT system usage and our background as IT Consultants can offer a range of comprehensive services as follows:

IT Security Reviews: to review the security elements currently in place within your business and reviewing your business's ability to recover from attack;

Forensic IT investigation services: either to determine potential risks or investigate incidents that have occurred within your business to ensure you are fully aware of what has happened as can take appropriate action to protect your business; and

Designing and implementing IT security policies and procedures: so your company as a whole understands what part they have to play when using IT systems, implementing those elements in a way to ensure they don't effect normal business but still remain effective.

Next Generation Security Solutions with Watchguard

WatchGuard Technologies is a global leader of integrated, multi-function business security solutions that intelligently combine industry standard hardware, best-of-breed security features, and policy-based management tools. WatchGuard provides easy-to-use, but enterprise-powerful protection to hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide. WatchGuard products are backed by WatchGuard LiveSecurit Service, an innovative support program that ensures your business can adapt to the latest security threats as and when they happen.

This is why we provide our clients with IT security solutions from Watchguard. They offer competitively priced next generation security solutions to our clients along with a wide range of services that continually protect against both incoming and outgoing threats and are a great starting point for any business's IT security needs.