Top 5 Tips for Cybersecurity Month
We find ourselves at the start of Cybersecurity Month, a timely reminder of the critical need to fortify your digital defense. With the holiday season approaching, business and consumer activity is expected to surge—and so are cyberthreats. Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, has five essential cybersecurity tips to help shield you from threats beyond the breach.
1. Awareness and Training
Employees are the first line of defense for company assets. In 2023, 74% of breaches involved a human element, which includes phishing, clicking on unknown links, or simple human error (source: Verizon Data Breach Investigation 2023). By providing proper education on common security risks, you can construct a human firewall. In cybersecurity, the familiar saying holds true: “You’re only as strong as your weakest link.”
2. Incident Response Plan
Speed is the name of the game when it comes to cyber resilience. An incident response plan helps organizations react quickly when a breach occurs, minimize the impact, and improve recovery time. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provides a framework for businesses to follow when developing their incident response plan. The five-step cybersecurity framework includes:
- Identify
- Protect
- Detect
- Respond
- Recover
When implementing a robust cybersecurity framework, consider how all elements of IT infrastructure can contribute to layered defence against attacks. For example, within a Zero Trust Security architecture, HPE Aruba Networking Dynamic Segmentation enables continuously monitored and dynamically assessed, least-privilege access control that can help minimize and prevent lateral spread of attacks. For malware-based threats targeting hybrid workers, HPE Aruba Networking Secure Service Edge sandboxing capabilities allow organizations to test suspicious files in a safe, virtual environment and destroy malicious files before they cause damage.
3. Monitoring and Intrusion Detection
Securing your digital assets is like safeguarding a bank vault, where monitoring external threats alone is insufficient. You also need to observe internal activities. Employing security tools before and after an incident is key to resilience. With Zerto, you can leverage technologies like security information and event management (SIEM) to oversee malicious activities from diverse points in your environment, all through a centralized dashboard. Extended detection response (XDR) fortifies endpoints, adding an additional layer of security. Should a threat slip through your external defenses, Zerto real-time encryption anomaly detection comes into play. This feature monitors and promptly reports unusual activity, sounding the alarm within minutes. Quick detection enables you to pinpoint when the attack occurred so you can recover to a point seconds before the attack.
4. Disaster Recovery
Cyberattacks can have devastating consequences like loss of critical data, substantial financial loss, and tarnished brand image. To counteract this escalating threat landscape, Zerto employs a range technologies and best practices. Two standout features include continuous data protection (CDP) and our journaling technology. CDP ensures that organizations continuously capture and store changed data in near real time, allowing for almost instantaneous recovery. The journal logs the changed data at checkpoints that are only 5–15 seconds apart, giving you granularity, not wide gaps from reverting back to nightly backups.
5. Data Backup
The well-known metaphor, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” holds true for your backups. Diversification is key. Zerto enables one-to-many replication, streamlining the process of copying data from the production site to multiple target locations. This capability is invaluable for the 3-2-1-1 backup rule: maintain three copies of your data and two different storage methods, with one copy offsite and ensure one copy air gapped.
Cybersecurity demands active learning, proactive teaching, and consistent awareness. Although you’ve learned a few tips, your ongoing commitment to fortify your business is your best bet to remain secure and resilient. If you would like to learn more how Zerto can protect your business, visit the Zerto Overview.
Martin Oderinde Product Marketing Manager
