As an executive that leads, and depends on, your IT Professionals or outsourced IT provider, be sure to know these five essential steps that have a massive impact on your cybersecurity protection and how frequently your team must address them:
- Apply Critical Security Updates – This is an essential yet never-ending task. Executives decide how soon they want the updates installed after release. It is common to apply workstation updates immediately. Focus on updating servers as quickly as your IT team can support, preferably less than a week to test, practice uninstalling, and deploy updates in stages. Remember to update non-Microsoft products. Patch your infrastructure devices, including firewalls and routers.
2. Change User Accounts so they are not Local Administrators – By default, if an attacker takes over a user’s computer, the attacker will have full administrative rights. Your IT team must configure users to be local standard users each time you set up new computers
3. Ensure IT Pros Manage Computers – Provide Your IT Team time to configure remote management for every new device a worker will use. They need to control your anti-malware solution, manage patches, and perform other tasks on each computer via a management console.
4. Implement two-step login – Protection for your network, VPN, and online programs. If you choose, Microsoft allows you to get rid of passwords and use text messages, an authenticator app, or other ways to authenticate. One-tap login is convenient. Your IT team needs to set up the authentication on your services and enroll each new worker you add to your team.
5. Have an Independent Cybersecurity Advisor who Performs Yearly Comprehensive Testing – They will guide and answer your questions and perform comprehensive testing at least once a year.
If your team’s not had time to implement the other items in this list yet, the process might take a year, depending on their workload and expertise.
Additionally, Practice Restoring Your Data – It is not a trivial process to practice a full restore, but you must practice to ensure the process works and restores quickly enough. Practice yearly.
Please forward this message to your executive friends so they can visit about these essential steps with the IT Professionals who support their organizations.