How To Perform a Cybersecurity Assessment in 5 Steps

A cybersecurity assessment isn’t as scary as it sounds! In fact, it’s meant to better protect your business from cyberthreats.

While there are many ways to assess your business and cyber risks, sometimes the best approach is to look at the most basic approach.

That begs the question, how vulnerable is your business?

Go through this quick 5-step assessment to determine your cybersecurity risk:

Step 1: Are you using good password practices?

Good passwords that you can actually remember aren’t as hard to make as you think: we put out an entire webinar on it!

In today’s age of technology however, you need more than just a good password: you need MFA.

MFA is an added layer of protection to better secure your accounts in the event your password is somehow compromised.

Are you using good password practices? 「」

Step 2: Are you using good backup practices?

There are several kinds of backup practices but we normally follow 3-2-1 backup strategies.

This means that we have at least 3 copies of all data with 2 backups locally available and 1 physically off-site.

Without this, your business and your data are at risk every single day.

How do you know when you have bad backup practices?

Bad backup practices are most often discovered when you need backups the most: during a data recovery event.

Great backup practices mean regularly monitoring and testing backups to ensure that issues are identified well in advance of any type of data recovery event.

Are you using good backup practices?「」

Step 3: Are you regularly installing security updates?

We get it, software updates are annoying. But by not updating your
software or leaving them unpatched, you’re technically inviting
attackers to try and expose your vulnerabilities!

Cybercriminals actively search for weak points to penetrate your business and your data, so it’s important to install those updates!

Are you regularly installing security updates? 「✔」

Step 4: Are you regularly checking your work?

We recommend regularly “checking your work” to ensure that what you expect to in place, is in fact working and functioning as expected.

This means you should regularly review of your security policies, confirm that security groups and access controls are accurate and up-to-date, assess password policies to ensure they meet current standards (including the use of additional tools like MFA), and test your backups regularly!

By checking your work across information systems within your business, you significantly decrease the risk of a successful cyberattack.

Are you regularly installing security updates?「✔」

Step 5: Is someone accountable for your cybersecurity?

If everyone is responsible, then no one is responsible.

Your data is your business and so clearly defining who is accountable for cybersecurity is incredibly important to ensuring that you remain both protected and resilient to an attack.

Designating someone—either an in-house expert or an external expert like Clearbridge—to be accountable for your cybersecurity is a great first step towards keeping your data safe.

Is someone accountable for your cybersecurity?「」

How’d you do?

This five step assessment is a great first step in ensuring your cybersecurity is up to standards, but there are many areas we didn’t have time to cover. If this assessment left you feeling uncertain, please get in touch so that we can help you to identify the next steps to take.

For a more in-depth look into how to secure your business, read our complete 25-step Cybersecurity audit e-book!

Too busy to read the e-book? Talk to us today and let us protect your business instead!