In an evolving cyber landscape, businesses need to do everything they can to reinforce their digital defences. Threats are always changing, with new ones emerging every day. There is a constant need to re-evaluate your methods and adapt to malicious behaviour.

The dynamic nature of modern digital activity makes it inherently challenging to keep up with your cyber security practices, which can leave businesses feeling like they are always on the back-foot when it comes to staying secure. 

Why is cyber security important?

First things first: why is cyber security so important in today’s business landscape? It’s all about data.

Data is the lifeblood of modern business, and any organisation’s most valuable resource. It’s estimated that by 2025, the amount of data generated by humans will top 175 zettabytes—or 175,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 GB.

That’s a lot of data that can be leaked, stolen, sold, held to ransom or otherwise used for nefarious ends by bad actors.

Securing this data is therefore paramount for any and every organisation in order to:

Protect sensitive information
In today’s digital age, a huge amount of sensitive information is stored and transmitted electronically, making it vulnerable. Cyber security helps to safeguard this information from unauthorised access, theft, or misuse.

Maintain business continuity
A cyber attack can disrupt business operations, resulting in financial losses, damage to reputation, and legal liabilities. Cyber security helps to mitigate the risk of such attacks and ensures that businesses can continue to operate even in the event of a cyber incident.

Ensure privacy of customers and employees
Cyber security helps to protect personal information such as social security numbers, credit card details, and health records from being stolen or misused by hackers.

Prevent cybercrime
Cybercrime is a growing threat that can result in financial losses, identity theft, and other forms of fraud. The cost of data-related cybercrime is on track to hit a staggering $10.5 trillion by 2025, but robust cyber security helps to prevent these crimes by detecting and preventing unauthorised access to computer systems and networks.

What is threat prevention? 

Threat prevention is designed to alleviate the pressure of changing cyber threats and help businesses stay up to date with their cyber security. Threat prevention generally refers to tools that perform threat detection and prevention actions, such as endpoint detection and response, or policies and cyber security strategies that prioritise preventative techniques.  

This involves implementing processes that work to mitigate the possibility of attacks, for example by reducing potential entry points and vulnerabilities in your system. In contrast, threat response actions work reactively – only acting once an attack has taken place. 

What is a cybersecurity vulnerability?

A cybersecurity vulnerability is a weakness or flaw in a computer system, software application, or network that can be exploited by an attacker to gain unauthorised access or cause harm.

Vulnerabilities can arise due to a variety of factors such as software bugs, misconfigurations, poor password practices, or social engineering attacks.

Why is threat prevention important? 

Threat prevention helps organisations build business resilience. Organisations can use these techniques to stay ahead of cyber threats, and keep their technologies, teams and processes up to date, to respond to changing environments in a timely manner. All of these tactics help organisations get ahead of any cyber security vulnerabilities and prevent incidents like breaches or hacks.

We believe “prevention is better than cure”. While organisations may reach the same finish line, so to speak, of recovering and returning to business–as–usual activity, much more is lost during the ‘cure’ approach. During a post-attack recovery, organisations could lose clients and business, resulting in much greater costs to revenue, reputation and performance –not to mention the direct costs of resolving any impacts on data or assets. Preventing the attack protects both the business and customer security.   

Taking preventative steps gives businesses a proactive way to reduce their cyber threats instead of responding to them once the damage is done. 

How can businesses implement prevention practices? 

First of all, implementing a high-quality cyber security solution and cyber security practices is essential. Sophisticated solutions delivered by experts, like Splunk, act as your best line of defence against attacks, allowing businesses to be proactive, rather than reactive. Modern tools – such as User and Entity Behaviour Analytics (UEBA)– are particularly designed to help identify and mitigate insider threats attacks in advance.  

The next approach any business can take to strengthen their prevention practices is to continually monitor and evaluate their current cyber architecture. To prevent the generation of gaps in your security you should ensure that your cyber security strategy is properly managed and updated. 

Often a simple human error, such as not following best practices or not deploying your tool in the most suitable way for your environment, can be the reason vulnerabilities appear. Ultimately, any cyber security tool can only take you so far – achieving the full benefit of your solutions requires organisations to use and maintain their tools properly.  

Businesses should therefore consistently monitor and check the quality of their tools, processes, and configurations to ensure everything is working at optimum levels. This not only means organisations can check how their tools are performing, but also provides the opportunity to fix weaknesses and prevent possible attacks.   

With a potential cyber-attack occurring every 39 seconds today, it’s now more important than ever to evaluate your cybersecurity systems and alleviate any potential points of entry for threats – from malicious internals to any possible breaches. With a Splunk Health Check, not only are these potential sources for attack highlighted, but they are also future-proofed. Introducing resilience and support to a cybersecurity plan, the Splunk Health Check ensures your data is safeguarded against any potential threats. 

What is the Splunk Health Check? 

RiverSafe offers a Splunk Health Check to ensure your technology solutions are protecting your business the way they should. 

Working alongside your team, we perform audits, assessments, optimisation and more to determine how your current solutions are performing, reveal any problems, and identify and what can be done to improve. We will also help you deploy solutions to identified issues – for example updating integrated products, operational status KPI’s, technologies, configurations, and teams. 

This comprehensive service complements your technology architecture, enhancing your existing investments into cyber solutions, protecting business-critical activity, and ultimately supporting you to keep pace with evolving threat landscapes. 

Through a Splunk Health Check, you can have the confidence that your environment is secure and be introduced to new ways to get the most out of your Splunk solutions. 

DOWNLOAD OUR SPLUNK HEALTH CHECK BUSINESS SOLUTIONS SHEET 

The benefits of a health check: 

Understanding your digital environment 

Get to know what’s working and what isn’t in your digital environment and your processes and keep track of how the digital landscape is evolving.  

Optimising your solution performance 

By understanding your environment, you can make improvements and changes that optimise your performance and strengthen your architecture. This also helps to increasing ROI on your existing solutions and investments, with no need to introduce new technology. 

Proactively mitigating attacks  

Take action to fix problems and plug gaps before a crisis occurs – therefore helping you to create a safer environment less susceptible to cyber attacks. 

Reducing cyber costs

Recovering from the impacts of a cyber attack, such as lost customer trust or a data breach, can be extremely expensive and/or damaging in the short- and long-term. This is why prevention is more cost-efficient than cure. 

Why RiverSafe 

Our Professional Services consultants are dedicated to helping you optimise your Splunk deployment and give you the tools you need to continue to enjoy the highest quality of performance. 

Our expert team can review and audit your enterprise, cloud, or hybrid Splunk platform and implement tangible benefits to your business. 

Get in touch with one of our consultants today to get more information or book a service.