SMEs with smaller IT teams than large companies are vulnerable to cybercriminals due to their weak measures.
Drawing attention to the need to increase cyber security measures in SMEs, Komtera Technology Channel Sales Director Gürsel Tursun allows small companies to think big with 10 effective cyber security suggestions.
In the past few years, SMEs have come face-to-face with tough cyberattacks on issues such as endpoint protection, email threat and ransomware. While large companies act more consciously than previous years in the face of these problems, SMEs with small IT teams and insufficient budgets are vulnerable to cybercriminals. Noting that SMEs, like large businesses, can prevent attacks if they follow an effective roadmap on cyber security, Komtera Technology Channel Sales Director Gürsel Tursun shares 10 cyber security suggestions.
1. Invest in communication with upstream. Developing an annual strategic plan for cyber attacks with IT teams is one of the priorities of companies. It is important for teams to observe the statistics, trends and outlook of threats, evaluate the business risk posed by these threats and the company's defense capabilities against attacks, even budget planning and convey this issue at board meetings.
2. Leverage compliance to increase the security budget. Compliance budget is a strategic step that enables company expenditures to be adapted to different scenarios and to obtain predictions about the future. Leveraging compliance to improve the security environment will help identify emerging gaps in corporate security.
3. Consider the end-to-end costs of the products purchased. New devices have solution costs in various areas, from initial deployment to post-installation maintenance. When investing in a new cybersecurity product, understanding investments that require real product cost and security coverage, upgrade frequency and requirements, dashboard / SIEM monitoring for alerts, and more prevent high spending.
4. Combine security platforms. There can be many layers of security, each of which increases the level of IT complexity. Using a single product that combines multiple technologies allows to eliminate this problem.
5. The most well-known or expensive brand may not be the best. Checking comparison sites, reading blogs, and talking with your colleagues to benefit from experience with various solutions helps find the right solution. It is necessary to delve deeper into how solutions are ranked in terms of third-party reviews and security effectiveness.
6. Be sure to follow the alerts. Small teams may not have the resources to track every alert. That's why setting policies that define when a particular alert should be addressed helps ease the workload of IT teams.
7. Think of security solutions that don't get in the way of your work. Employees may tend to ignore security policies when faced with a situation that causes disruption to their work. Instead of establishing a uniform policy for all organizations in the company, creating multiple policies per role contributes to more effective results.
8. Automate as much as possible. If there is more than one manual task in organizations, integrating new automation technologies into the workflow automates the process and makes the work of the teams easier.
9. Think beyond the devices and solutions you use. About the products and solutions companies use, "Is there an initial setup cost?", "Is there a dedicated account manager?" and "How proactive is customer service?" It helps them reach the most effective solution for them instead of a semi-working solution.
10. Leverage SaaS offerings to reduce costs, overheads and resources. SaaS solutions; it reduces deployment, management requirements, maintenance resources and costs. Many security SaaS offerings are more effective as a cloud-based architecture given its stronger processing capabilities. It is necessary to control and research the security stack to verify what can be changed with a SaaS-based solution and to take advantage of centralized management, processing and operating costs without sacrificing protection.