The COVID-19 pandemic forced the world to lock themselves inside, leading organizations to embrace the remote working arrangement. As a result, several security measures were neglected, and cyber-attackers found a brilliant new way to exploit system vulnerabilities.
In just two months after the pandemic struck, Saudi Arabia saw over 7 million attacks. The gateway to these attacks was primarily remote desktops and the protocols that employees used to access their resources, increasing the need for a more robust cybersecurity posture.Making a move to a secure, certified cloud is a proactive cybersecurity approach that can avert risks and protect your data from being breached. Managed cloud from BIOSME is embraced by hundreds of companies across the Middle East, given its high levels of security and massively reduced cost.
Layered security for 360-degree protection
The best way to avert risks is to prepare before an attack happens. Educating your employees about cybersecurity, following good cyber hygiene, planning for risks, and conducting tests to ensure you’re prepared are some of the first steps of a proactive cybersecurity approach. You can also hire ethical hackers to try to hack into your system, giving you insights into vulnerabilities and gateways that your IT teams could have missed before.
Proactive cybersecurity involves following a layered security framework that deploys several security controls so that each corner of the ecosystem is free from vulnerabilities. The multi-layer approach ensures that you have a backup to bolster your defences when your initial plan has failed.
According to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, there are five primary functions – Identity, Protect, Detect, Respond, Recover – that will enable you to successfully prevent data breaches or respond to them more effectively. A multi-layered framework with the following levels should incorporate NIST’s suggested functions.
1. Firewall: Monitor incoming and outgoing traffic on your network
2. Patch management: Identity vulnerabilities in outdated software and fix the bugs and errors
3. Multi-factor authentication (MFA): Introduce MFA as a verification practice to access documents and data
4. Endpoint protection: Include all the hardware (printers, scanners, laptops, security cameras, etc.) in the security plan
5. Network security: Protect your network against unauthorized access
6. Disaster recovery: Opt for disaster recovery as a service to reduce the downtime of your operations and damage that can be done to your assets. CloudHPT's Cisco-powered disaster recovery allows companies to protect themselves from data loss and application downtime while achieving compliance
Why is a Proactive Approach Better Than a Reactive One?
According to The Economist Intelligence Unit, companies that adapted the proactive cybersecurity approach faced 53% fewer cyber-attacks than those that didn’t. Let’s see why.
1. Your team saves time as they don’t have to constantly avert crises one after the other.
2. Instead of performing a check after the attack and trying to grab hold of your lost data, you can prevent breaches in the first place.
3. With proactive measures, you can be at par, if not ahead, with cyber-attackers.
4. Proactive cybersecurity also helps you sniff out insiders trying to sabotage your company using malicious methods.
5. Since you will have more layers of defence, you can also improve compliance.
Is Your Data Secure on M365?
Did you know that many customers mis-sold M365 without backup in place? Many find out about the recoverability challenges when it is already too late. Thankfully, there is an easy solution to removing the risk from your business.
BIOS have a long-standing partnership with Veeam Backup. We use Veeam to protect thousands of virtual machines on CloudHPT across all our datacenters and, accordingly, they are our vendor of choice for backup on M365.
Our Veeam backup service includes the deployment of your own dedicated Veeam server on Azure in the UAE. Where we connect it to your M365 tenant and securely back up your data to Azure Blob storage. This provides the most cost-effective solution for data backup.
Achieve High Levels of Cloud Security with BIOS Secured
The best way to deal with cybersecurity is to move to a secured cloud that meets all security standards and is managed by experts in the field.
At BIOS Middle East, our cloud security practice is called BIOS Secured, which is designed to defend your organization from increasingly sophisticated, targeted cybercrime threats. We take on the day-to-day defence of your infrastructure by monitoring your network, systems, and data 24 hours every. The testimony to our exceptional cybersecurity posture is Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Security Trust Assurance and Risk (STAR) Level 2 certification we recently received.
