Since the COVID-19 pandemic, cybersecurity attacks have been up by 600%. Your physical and digital security are linked, and you must ensure that both strategies are fortified against modern security threats.
Keep reading to learn about the types of threats affecting your physical, digital, and cyber-physical security. The security climate is changing, and you must implement infrastructure changes to keep up with the modern security threat sphere.
Physical Security Risks To Your Business
Below is a list of the various physical security risks posed to your business in the modern security climate – along with some of the best practices to prevent these risks from evolving into serious breaches.
Intrusion
Your physical security strategy reduces your exposure to intrusion. If an unauthorized person were to gain access to your premises, employee safety, data security, and valuable company assets could be at risk.
To mitigate the risk of intrusion, you need to implement commercial building security systems. Physical access control eliminates the risk of lockpicking by replacing keys with keycards and fobs. Your employees and authorized individuals can enter the building using their keycards, while intruders will not be able to enter the premises using lockpicking methods.
Natural Disasters And Emergencies
Natural disasters and emergencies on site could result in the loss of life, injury, and the destruction of your company’s most valuable assets. To ensure your business is equipped to survive natural disasters, you should ensure that all of your digital assets are housed in a cloud-based location – this way, you will be able to retrieve the data should your servers and digital resources be destroyed. Additionally, you should ensure that your business has insurance to cover the cost of recovery for your valuable assets and resources.
You should ensure that your emergency evacuation and response procedures can ensure the safety of staff members on site. You can do this by implementing cloud-based access control, allowing system administrators to initiate evacuation procedures and unlock all doors on site. Additionally, you should implement alarm systems such as smoke and carbon monoxide detectors that will alert staff to the incident as soon as possible.
Employee Theft And Poaching
In addition to securing your building from intruders, you must ensure that you are protected as much as possible from potential breaches from employees.
You can apply role-based permissions to your physical security to ensure your employees cannot access these resources and mitigate exposure in an internal security breach. Only high-level employees can access client data and server rooms, while others will only gain access permissions to enter the spaces they need for daily operations.
Digital Security Risks To Your Business
To help you understand why cybersecurity is such a crucial aspect of your business health, you will find a list of various digital security risks below.
Human Error
Human error is one of the leading causes of cybersecurity breaches within businesses. Employees must be provided with the training and information necessary to spot and avoid untrustworthy online sources. To provide your employees with adequate training and reduce your digital security exposure, you should cover the following topics in your training:
- Password protection – you should instruct employees not to share their passwords with anyone and that they should create strong and unique passwords across all of their company accounts. Easily-guessed passwords leave the whole system exposed.
- Phishing scams – you should provide your employees with educational resources about phishing scams, how to spot them, and how to avoid falling victim.
- Software updates – you should have a company-wide policy that prevents anyone from accessing company data and resources using outdated software versions. These software versions often contain vulnerabilities not present in current and updated versions. Failing to update this software would result in increased cybersecurity vulnerability.
Hacking
Hacking is one of the biggest threats to your security strategy. To prevent unauthorized users from accessing your cloud-based data and to improve your cloud security, you need to provide at least the following forms of cybersecurity protection:
- Firewalls – a firewall will monitor all incoming and outgoing traffic on your network to ensure that only verified, and trustworthy sources gain access.
- Encryption – you should implement encryption to ensure that it will be useless if someone steals data from your network. Encryption protects your data by making it unreadable to those without the cipher.
- VPNs – to ensure your company’s IP address remains private, you should invest in a VPN that redirects your network traffic through an external server.
If your client data is exposed, you will face legal ramifications and lose client trust. So, consider data security a top priority in your security strategy.
Furthermore, using a credible SMM panel that promotes organic growth could be essential for both enhancing your digital security and online visibility.
Cyber-Physical Security Threats
Some security threats affect both your cyber and physical security. For instance, if someone were to hack into your cloud-based physical security platforms, they would be able to unlock your company’s security doors. Or, if someone could access your premises, they would gain access to your server rooms and sensitive data. A stringent security strategy would keep this connection between cyber and physical security in mind, merging IT and security teams to provide coordinated and all-inclusive security.
Summary
The security world is changing, and businesses must adopt a more philosophical outlook when protecting their physical and digital resources. Consider the top security risks and vulnerabilities listed above, along with the best mitigating tools. Now is the time to fortify your building and digital security for improved business health.
