7 Ways To Build A Cybersecurity Compliance Plan
Data breaches are inevitable, meaning that it can happen to any company or organization. Whenever cyber threats occur, it can be hard for your employees to access the tools they need to do their jobs; and your company may lose out on generating revenue.
Therefore, everyone in the company or organization needs to play their part in managing the risks, as well as practice compliance with ever-changing security and privacy regulations. Without compliance, your company or organization will run the risk of being hit hard by mandates from government entities or having to pay fines (4% of annual revenue, or $24 million) for non-compliance.
Either way - whether you lose money from cyber threats, or from non-compliance, you can't let this happen to your business. So, what can you do?
Now would be a good time for you to establish an effective cybersecurity compliance plan, so that you'll not only stay ahead of cybercriminals, but also get a stamp of approval from government entities and avoid any fines and bad rep.
Consider the 7 following ways to create an efficient cybersecurity program:
Create A Team
Enable Risk Analysis
- Identify all information assets, and the systems, networks, and data that they access.
- Assess the risk level of each data type by determining where high risk information is stored, transmitted, and collected. Then, rate the risk of those locations accordingly.
- Analyze risk by using the following formula: Risk = (Liklihood of Breach x Impact)/Cost
- Set the risk tolerance by determining whether to transfer, refuse, accept, or mitigate the risk.
Choose A Framework
- Scope of coverage (breath)
- Amount of details (depth)
- Taxonomy (overall arrangement of requirements & formatting)
- Industry-specific terminology
Set Your Controls
- Firewalls
- Encryption
- Password policies
- Vendor risk management program
- Employee training
- Insurance
Set Up Policies
Update Policies And Procedures
Monitor And Respond Nonstop
Whether your business is small or mid-sized, you should still consider building a compliance team that will assess and monitor cybersecurity. Just keep in mind that as organizations continue to move their critical business operations to the cloud, that cybersecurity won't (and will never) exist in a vacuum. Therefore, you'll need to create an interdepartmental workflow, and make that workflow known across business and IT departments.
With risk analysis, it'll help your business be more cybersecurity-compliant with a risk-based approach. Here's how risk analysis works:
Choosing a framework comes from understanding your risk profile. As such, consider the following:
A framework serves as a benchmark; however, whichever framework you use depends on the environment of your business, meaning that you should decide what's important for your organization, as well as its security and compliance goals.
As you set up risk analysis, you'll have to set up the controls to maintain it and ensure that you comply with cybersecurity. Now, based on your risk tolerance, you must determine how to mitigate or transfer risk.
Your controls can include:
When you set up policies, you're ensuring that the policies that you implement will comply with cybersecurity. Your policies will document your compliance activities and controls, thus serving as the foundation for any internal or external audits that are necessary.
When you create an efficient risk assessment plan, it allows your organization's compliance team to adjust specific policies and procedures, or to come up with entirely new ones. That's a good thing, because many regulatory bodies want their compliance department to provide them with details as to how the policies and procedures can work with their installed cybersecurity programs.
Since cyber threats are known for evolving, all compliance requirements must do the same. Cybercriminals are always looking for new ways to steal data by using existing strategies, rather than find new vulnerabilities (a.k.a. Zero Day Attacks). One example of this is when they combine two different types of ransomware to create a new one.
Businesses and organizations must be several steps ahead of these cyber threats. Therefore, organizations must do more than just continuous monitoring, which only detects new threats. Rather, your compliance program must also respond to these threats before they turn into a data breach.
Conclusion
As cybersecurity continues to evolve, your business must have the right tools to guarantee compliance. Since this is a desired plan for organizations across many industries, why not join the revolution in making cybersecurity better on your end, and preventing unforeseeable cyber-attacks by implementing a compliance plan today?
Katherine Rundell is a write and editor at History writing service UK. As a professional writer, she specializes in technological topics like Cybersecurity Compliance.
