Develop an Effective Cybersecurity Strategy for Your Organization

There is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to cybersecurity; every business needs a unique cybersecurity strategy that aligns with its objectives and is suitable for the threats that particular businesses face.

Cybersecurity strategy differs across industries, such as the medical industry, retail, and real estate. But what exactly is a cybersecurity strategy?

It is a strategy that provides a roadmap, a guideline; it will provide a direction in which your business should head and a framework in which it should follow. Your business can scale and become bigger at any time, so the best cyber security strategy should always evolve as your business evolves.

In this blog, we will discuss every step with the details you need to create a successful cybersecurity strategy and implement it in your organization.

Keep This in Mind!

Cybersecurity is not your responsibility alone; it requires cross-functional cooperation and collaboration. To create a successful cybersecurity strategy, you first need to ensure that your cybersecurity strategy accounts for interdependencies between departments and involves relevant stakeholders.

Prepare your mindset when you develop the strategy with the aim of achieving the business objectives and goals. Securing the organization itself is not the end goal; it is just a way to increase the ROI. If no cyberattacks happen around the world that make businesses lose money, there will be no security industry!

So alignment of the strategy with business objectives will help justify investment in cybersecurity measures and foster buy-in from key stakeholders. Remember, if the CEO doesn’t want to invest in security, if he doesn’t consider it to be one of his priorities, why should anybody else in the company feel that way?

Now, let's dive deep and walk through 7 steps on how to create a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy.

Step 1. Your Cyber Threat Landscape

What are you facing? Ransomware? Malware? or Phishing? Maybe insider threats — what are the most common attacks that have happened in your industry? What are the most threats that your region suffers from?

Understanding what you are facing and how these attacks operate is key to building an effective cybersecurity strategy. It will give a clear picture of what you should do and what you should not do.

And it is not just what you are facing "now," but also what you are facing in "the future." You need to get yourself up to speed with predicted cyber threat trends that could affect your industry and your organization.

Step 2: You Can’t Secure What You Can’t See

After you understand what you are facing, it is time to understand what you have!

You need to identify what assets you have by checking organizational assets, third-party vendors, individuals, the various types of data generated and stored, and the most valuable data sources for your organization.

This process of understanding what you have to secure will require collaboration from multiple departments. You need to make a repository containing all assets, i.e., servers, workstations, laptops, operating systems, and corporate-owned mobile devices.

After that, you need to determine the data classifications:

• Is this server public? that would not impact the business negatively by being breached.
• Is it confidential?
• Can it not be shared with third parties?
• Is there any data that is required to be strictly controlled in terms of regulation and compliance?
• Who is the owner of this asset?
• What other user privileges have been assigned for this asset?
• The network connection between these servers. Create a network diagram and make it available and up-to-date

After considering these factors, it is now time to see any associated vulnerabilities for every asset, especially those that have the highest risk to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the organization’s business systems.

Vulnerability assessment and penetration test are essential activities in these steps.

Also, keep in mind that executives at the board level are unable to understand cyber jargon, and it is hard for them to know what the best cyber practices are to apply to their organizations. Therefore, a security risk assessment will also serve as an executive summary to help your organization make informed decisions about its security posture.

Applying this step will determine your overall security posture and make you ready for the next step.

Step 3: Set Your Cybersecurity Goals

This step will be your starting point to know what needs to improve, what needs to be improved, and what solution you will use to solve a particular weakness that you noticed in the risk assessment step. It helps you determine if these systems meet security best practices or not.

That could be implementing a next-gen firewall or maybe improving endpoint security. The point is that you now know what security products actually fit your business's needs without buying unnecessary security solutions that will increase your burden. because these days, the cybersecurity technology field is crowded.

What you aim for in this step when setting your security goal is to achieve the “Five Pillars of Information Assurance Model,” which includes the protection of confidentiality, integrity, availability, authenticity, and non-repudiation.

What you also need to do is set reasonable expectations for your goals. Does the company have the budget to buy an EDR? Do you have the expertise in your team to operate in cybersecurity solutions?

As long as your cybersecurity strategy achieves those goals, your business should be in top cybersecurity shape.

Step 4: Select A Security Framework

This step will help you see if you are on the right track or if you are missing something. It will provide guidance on what you need to continuously monitor and also determine the security posture of your organization.

There are multiple frameworks available today; however, choosing one will depend on your industry. As an example, the HIPAA framework will be in healthcare, but the PCI will be in the banking industry.

With the three previous steps, you are now aware of what framework will be suitable for the nature of your business and its goals.

As we said, the main goal is to increase the ROI. This step will not just help you build a cybersecurity strategy but also give your company a market advantage against competitors because it will be easy to partner with other companies, increasing your business revenue because your organization will be represented before international regulations.

Step 5: Cybersecurity Policies

The goal of this step is to allow employees to make informed decisions when they face risks or potential threats because 88% of employees had no clue about their organization’s IT security policy.

Communicate these policies to all employees, ensuring they understand their role in maintaining a secure environment.

Make it as easy as possible for employees to know the security rules; communicate them in a clear and simple way using plain language. Do not create a document that has 55 pages that everyone will be bored reading. Policies can be out of date as technology shifts and hackers become more sophisticated. Make them up-to-date to match the current threats.

Step 6: The Time to Act!

You put out a plan; now it is time to delegate the task to the team and make it happen in real life.

Who will do the task, and when? Also, when assigning tasks to your team, set a realistic timeline to meet your expectations.

Step 7: Review!

Tests and feedback are key to determining if your cybersecurity strategy is paying off or not. See if the strategy achieved the KPI. You need to evaluate and update it regularly because the threats are always changing and your strategy must change accordingly.