Blog 4 Tips to Maintain Cybersecurity Vigilance During the Holiday Season
It’s the most wonderful time of the year — but it's also when cybersecurity professionals need to stay vigilant.
By Teresa Cortez / 12 Dec 2024 / Topics: Cybersecurity
Here's a quick checklist to help protect your business operations during the holidays.
1. Data Backups
Establish a regular, automated backup schedule, keep multiple copies in different locations (such as a cloud service), and encrypt the data to provide additional layers of security. To further ensure the reliability and effectiveness of your data backup strategy, regularly test backups, maintain multiple versions, document procedures, monitor backup status, and develop a comprehensive disaster recovery plan.
2. Vulnerability Management
Mitigate risks from legacy technology by keeping known vulnerabilities isolated from confidential data and critical assets. Start by identifying your most valuable assets (think about what will cause you the most pain if it is non-operational), then run a vulnerability scan to identify known vulnerabilities. Lastly, ensure these known-vulnerable assets are segregated from those assets you’ve identified as most valuable.
3. Zero Trust Identities
Strengthen your identity and access management policies. Enforce least privilege access policies and multi-factor authentication methods. As with vulnerability management, start by understanding which technologies have the highest impact to your operations, and then ensure those with access to these assets only have the access they require. If this is already done, then consider setting up just-in-time policies to mature your zero-trust maturity posture further.
4. Managed Security Operations
Ensure you have constant visibility into threats across your technology landscape, as well as a team of experts proactively threat hunting. Utilizing a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution — which captures incidents from across technologies, including across multi-cloud environments — can help streamline threat visibility. Having 24x7x365 operations monitoring security incidents with automated responses to identified incidents, alignment with external threat intel, and proactive threat hunting can minimize threat impacts.
Adhering to these practices supports a resilient operational model, so you can focus on making sure your customers remain in festive spirits this holiday season.
Stay ahead of an evolving threatscape. Protect your data, devices, and users with ransomware readiness best practices.
Teresa Cortez
Sr. Product Manager, Insight
With a diverse background, Teresa has experience driving operational improvement, developing and launching products, and successfully designing and implementing ERP applications. She is passionate about using technology to build adaptable business operations, aiding business growth and innovation. As a product manager, she is focused on cross-collaboration to build offers that solve client challenges through enhanced security posture.
