Cybersecurity Should be Proactive Rather Than Reactive

While formulating the cloud security plan, there are two core principle approaches that a business should consider i.e., proactive or reactive.

• The proactive approach is the one that tries to prevent the occurrence of Cyber threats by troubleshooting problems before the threat occurrence. 
• The reactive Cybersecurity approach comprises of reacting over the Cyber threats, after their occurrence.

There is a flawed kind of mindset among enterprises i.e., reactive Cybersecurity measures are best to achieve online data protection in premises. They assume that anticipating threats will be too much expensive and also, it's unnecessary. Well, the financial and reputation rate of encountering attacks is growing every year without a pause. This means that the costing of remediation is likely to be higher than the cost that might be used to enforce proper security standards and controls at the first place. 

It’s Too Late to Take Actions After Threat Occurrence

You don’t have to move very far to determine the real examples of enterprises who suffered from cyber attacks because of the use of Cybersecurity reactive approach. In the year 2017, the WannaCry ransomware attack resulted in enormous issues for the NHS and a bundle of enterprises all over the world – Around 230,000 PCs were affected with this attack. After doing the surveys, we found that enterprises had failed to achieve proactive Cybersecurity measures for maintaining the core machines patched to fix a known vulnerability.

Internet Hackers Are Getting More Innovative

One of the major cloud computing security challenges faced by enterprises is the increase in sophistication of hackers. Growth in the hacking tactics and approaches with more availability of hacking utilities has made it possible for hackers to break the traditional defensive security products like anti-virus apps and firewalls. The respective scenario results in the emergence of more severe problems where threats are becoming tougher to detect. 

Nowadays, it is getting common for organizations to be exposed without even experiencing it. As per the Ponemon Institute, it acquires an average of around 191 days for a company to determine that it has been attacked. In order to counteract these issues, it is essential to gain deep visibility of what operation is happening in surroundings and at the endpoints. This helps in addressing the malicious activity at the early stage before it gets spread. Assume that the enterprise will be exposed at some stage and have a sufficient amount of monitoring procedures and controls at their exact locations for risk mitigation.

Achieve Cybersecurity Proactive Solution Via GDPR

As we all know that EU general data protection regulation standard came into force on May 25, 2018. This forced several enterprises to make modifications in their data protection and control policies, along with updates in existing cloud data security procedures. But the compliance with standards is more than just one-off changes to the policies. 

The main burden is on enterprises for putting on-place proper technical and business measures to secure personal information as well as address, investigate, and report the data breaches. Companies which fail in demonstrating a proactive Cybersecurity approach in the cloud computing security risks arenas might have to pay fines. Note that under GDPR compliance, enterprises that face personal record leakages are also expected to give an update to their customers in case there is a high risk to their freedoms and rights.

How to Enforce Proactive Cybersecurity in Business?

Till now, we assume that you have been clear with the fact that proactive approaches are more suitable in comparison with the reactive ones. But, now a question arises that ‘what are the practical measures to implement them?’ First of all, it is a good habit to continuously invest in security assessment services like vulnerability scan and penetrating test. This helps in exposing the weakness over the business networks, PCs, and applications, prior to the data exploitation by hackers. Proactive network and endpoint monitoring systems should be enforced to hunting for and to respond to the small threats, which occur on a daily basis. Giving training to individuals regarding Cybersecurity is one of the excellent practices to enhance cloud data security awareness and knowledge.

Being proactive doesn’t have to be necessarily a prohibitively expensive measure – It means the allocation of time and resources for preparing your premises to prevent and respond to the attacks at a very early stage. Instead of investing extra time, money, and efforts to deal with cyber threats after their occurrence, it's better to prepare yourself earlier only. At the end of this post, we only want to say that ‘Don’t wait for the internet threat to occur; enforce proactive Cybersecurity measures properly before the time – to be safe from afterwards disastrous results of Cyberattacks.’