The Best Practices To Secure Your Business
Look no further. Our IT staff has assembled these 5 core recommendations through years of experience supporting bank and credit union IT infrastructure and people.
Make it everyone’s business
We put this first because we’ve seen too many experts neglect this one or leave it at the end as a sort of footnote. Security awareness training is THE SINGLE most POWERFUL ACTION you can take to combat security threats of all types. Keep security at the top of your mind and communicate it out to your staff, customers, members, and the community. Hold webinars and seminars and post information on your web site and internal systems. Create a culture of awareness and watch how your security posture changes for the better gradually and consistently over time.
Hire a consultant
We are not talking about spending a ton of money here. But we are suggesting that an outside unbiased party will ALWAYS give you a more accurate depiction of your security posture than an internal resource ever could. Internal security professionals are the harbingers of outside security experts and should be seen that way by leadership. If a consultant seems frivolous, then perhaps you should be concerned about your next breach because it’s coming soon. A good security consultant will tell you where you need to focus to round out an improved security posture.
Learn more about security tools
The security industry is constantly evolving and the tools and analytics just keep getting better. We still have many miles to go before we can say we are keeping up with the hackers, but tools like SIEM, services like Continuous Security Monitoring, and products like secure document viewing (NOAH SecureView achieves this) have come a long way in recent months. We know you can be deluged with information coming in all directions where it just seems like white noise, so that is why we created security programs to offload some of that burden.
Stay one step ahead of the regulators
In conjunction with a good consultant, a carefully planned due diligence process needs to be built and maintained for all aspects of your operation. Vendor due diligence is extremely important as sub par vendor security and processes are the Achilles heel in most banks and credit unions. But regulators look for many other aspects of your security posture to measure your risk rating. Keeping current with government sites and security periodicals is a great way to stay one step ahead.
Practice your business continuity plan
We don’t just mean read through your plan every year, and we certainly don’t mean test your backups with a quick restore of a folder to a server. A true business continuity plan will take into account all aspects of the business and business processes. It will document the procedures and actions needed for everyone in the organization and it will be done in a clear and easy to understand fashion. Keep BCP near the top of your list to assure your board of directors that you can survive the worst of times.
Our Strength is in our Security
We’ll work with you to strengthen your security posture. Let’s get started.