Professional Advice from a 40 year IT / IS (and Navy) Vetera

The primary step in protecting your systems and data is to identify which elements require safeguarding. This entails assessing the current infrastructure, security tools, and systems in use, as well as your growth objectives. It also involves reviewing log monitoring procedures to confirm that appropriate logs are being monitored and that alerts are dispatched for any unusual events.

To ensure the safety of your systems against external threats, it's essential to evaluate any deployed external systems and assess current test results to identify vulnerabilities. 

When vulnerabilities are identified, remediation steps must be defined and critical public-facing assets should be locked down. This practice helps to ensure your organization is well-protected against the constantly-evolving threat landscape.

As part of your security strategy, it's important to review any recent vulnerability test results. Based on the findings, you can map out a plan for comprehensive patch management across all of your systems. Additionally, it's crucial to establish a backup process that includes periodic validation for added peace of mind and assurance. Ensure that your backup resources are suitably isolated to prevent any undetected attacks.

To ensure compliance and effectiveness, it's important to have well-defined policies in place for acceptable use, email usage, password creation, encryption, and system access. Keeping these policies up-to-date in response to evolving security concerns is equally important. How do you measure and validate compliance to ensure these policies are effe

Before allowing a vendor to connect to your network, it's crucial to ensure that they have appropriate access controls and adhere to their own written security policies. 

Have you evaluated their SOC audit or other compliance reports to confirm compliance with industry and regulatory standards?

The effective monitoring of security activities relies on the accessibility and analysis of operational logs. Conducting a review of your operations logs can allow you to guarantee that the right logs are captured and evaluated. 

By configuring actionable event alerts, you can ensure that staff is automatically notified of investigation and remediation steps in response to identified risks.