In today's digital age, businesses must prioritize cybersecurity to protect their sensitive data and maintain their customers' trust. Industry cybersecurity compliance standards are often seen as the benchmark for achieving a secure environment, but compliance alone is not enough. While excellent for setting a cybersecurity baseline to operate from, oftentimes, compliance regulations are just that: baselines.
Cyberthreats are constantly evolving and attack vectors continue to expand, but regulatory requirements aren’t enough to fully cover all your and your customers’ valued assets. Although the US White House has recently called for an increase in regulatory requirements, especially for IaaS/cloud providers, until they are implemented, businesses need to take matters into their own hands. Add in complexities introduced by remote working and digital transformation, and it becomes apparent that cybersecurity is more than just ticking boxes before your next audit. Alternatively, it’s more of a never-ending journey that demands continuous effort and improvement.
Here at Todyl, we believe that compliance is just the beginning of a much more robust approach to securing businesses of any size, be they SMBs or massive enterprises.
Compliance standards like Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provide a framework for businesses to ensure they are following best practices for securing their data. Often, compliance regulations are enforced by governing bodies at federal, municipal, or industry levels. They are created and maintained by experts in cybersecurity and data protection and are therefore inherently security minded.
These standards ensure that businesses meet the legal and regulatory obligations specific to their industry. Unfortunately, for some compliance regulations, that can translate to the minimum requirements from a cybersecurity standpoint. Said obligations usually pertain to keeping sensitive data secure and private, such as personal identification information (PII), protected health information (PHI), credit card and banking details, etc. In this way, compliance also helps businesses build trust with customers and partners who expect them to adhere to industry standards.
Although it plays an important part in maintaining data privacy and trust, meeting compliance alone does not guarantee that a business is secure from cyber threats. Compliance standards are often static, and while updated on a routine cadence, do not account for new and emerging threats.
Anyone even barely tapped into the 24-hour news cycle knows how prevalent cyberattacks are today. And though large companies get all the media coverage, no one is safe. In their 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), Verizon found that organizations of 1 to 1000 employees were involved in 2,065 security incidents that resulted in 715 breaches. For context, companies with over 1,000 employees were only involved in 636 incidents leading to 255 breaches. Hearkening back to the 2021 SMB DBIR, Verizon reported that similar incidents cost SMBs as much as $653,587.
While we can’t know for certain the level of compliance those companies met, we do know that their cybersecurity posture wasn’t equipped enough to rebuff threats to their business. And unfortunately, that lack of cybersecurity maturity cost them.
A proper cybersecurity posture involves more than just compliance. It requires businesses to take a proactive and holistic approach to cybersecurity. Businesses need to identify their assets and risk appetite; evaluate how the risks to their assets weigh against their level of risk tolerance; and develop a strategy to mitigate those risks while remaining below their tolerance. This means implementing a comprehensive cybersecurity framework that includes people, processes, and technology.
One way that businesses can enhance their cybersecurity posture is by conducting regular security assessments. Security assessments help businesses identify vulnerabilities and gaps in their cybersecurity program. With them, businesses gain insight into how cybercriminals can exploit weaknesses in their systems. They can also identify how to fill those gaps and strengthen their overall security posture.
Another important aspect of a proper security posture is employee awareness and training. Employees are often the weakest link in a business's cybersecurity program. They can unintentionally open the door to cyberthreats by falling for phishing scams, clicking on malicious links, or using weak passwords. Providing regular training and awareness programs can help educate employees on best practices for staying secure online.
Businesses need to be habitually prepared for incidents because a cyberattack is not a matter of if, but when. This is especially true given the prevalent, widespread nature of commoditized malicious code. Having an incident response plan in place can help businesses quickly respond to an incident and minimize damage. This plan should include steps to contain the incident, recover data, and restore operations as quickly as possible.
Although there’s no silver bullet to solving the cybersecurity problem, there are solutions that can help a business both meet industry compliance and build a proper security posture. Today’s best cybersecurity products offer ways to gain visibility across the entire business’s attack surfaces, as well as detect potential in-routes to critical assets or even ongoing incidents. They also protect endpoints from threats like malware and ransomware, actively identifying and preventing such attacks from making their mark on a business. Additionally, these products control and secure network access, allowing for granular configurability over who has access to what resources and limiting N/S and E/W traffic.
The top cybersecurity solutions go even further, providing businesses with dedicated, 24/7 teams who actively hunt threats to keep their business aware and informed of the latest attack vectors and types. As such, these solutions extend beyond technology, supporting the people in the business with more cybersecurity expertise. In concert, these features not only help businesses streamline their compliance endeavors but also move them up what is known as the security maturity curve and closer to the best overall cybersecurity posture they can achieve.
Achieving industry security compliance is an important step in securing a business's sensitive data. However, compliance is just the beginning, and alone is not enough to fully secure a business.
To learn more about the security maturity curve and how to go beyond compliance and progress your business up the curve, check out our eBook. Curated by our team of experts with decades of experience in cybersecurity, it will help you assess your level of cybersecurity maturity and what steps you can take to improve your security posture as a whole.
