Following on from Cyber Awareness Month, I’m reflecting on this year’s theme, ‘secure our world,’ and what it means for businesses. I believe the business world won’t keep turning without rock solid digital foundations, so we should work together to achieve that.

In fact, digitalisation goes far beyond foundations; it’s the lifeblood of a business. You only have to look around to realise we live in a digital world: from the coffee van taking mobile payments, to connected factories, to multinationals connecting every aspect of their business to a digital network.

This means that to protect your business, you must protect your digital foundations. This is increasingly critical as cyber threats are growing in sophistication and volume at lightning speed; at BT, we identify more than 2,000 cyber attacks every second — that’s over 200 million possible threats a day.

You need to take a comprehensive view of your security posture to protect your digital foundations. Here are five top tips to keep your business safe and thriving.

In any process it’s important to start with the basics. In a digital business world, this means recognising that connecting and protecting go hand in hand.

On a network infrastructure level, this means being alert about updates and patching to close gaps that an attack could slip through. Put regular ‘housekeeping’ time into your IT schedules to make sure this happens and to check that all security elements are functioning optimally.

On a workforce level, this means changing your people’s mindset from ‘It won’t happen to me’ to ‘When will it happen to me? Cyber attacks are a fact of life today, but training and coaching your people to spot and defend against attacks can mitigate the potential damage.

Create a culture that encourages people to behave safely online and be willing to alert you quickly to any errors they may have made, such as falling for a phishing email. These actions can be as important as the most sophisticated technological defences, making your people a human firewall. 

Our user adoption experts are also ready to provide cyber security training tailored to your organisation. This will help your people understand the fundamentals of cyber security and why it’s vital to the organisation.

You can’t protect what you don’t know you have. As IT infrastructure becomes more complex and hyper-connected, managing user privileges is increasingly challenging. Broad access account permissions make it easier for cyber attackers to infiltrate systems. Understanding your asset inventory and monitoring user actions across all access levels can mean the difference between successfully limiting the impact of a security breach and a sustained business-wide attack.

In this context, identity and access mechanisms that give you visibility and control of your estate are hugely valuable. They alert IT teams to incidents when users' privileges are increased, or new administration accounts are added or altered, making tightly controlling ‘least privilege’ access easier. 

Our security consulting services  offer tailored, expert advice on strategies, technologies and practices for safeguarding your digital and physical assets. Our consultants can review and advise on your security to deliver robust defence.

Protecting your business from its outer layers is examining how you can protect your network operations in a cloud-first world. Many businesses are moving most or all of their computing infrastructure to the public cloud and there’s a temptation to protect their network from the outside, relying on the built-in security of public clouds. However, these defences are challenging to configure and don’t protect the data moving between businesses and clouds. 

Instead, consider defending your network from the inside out by moving to an end-to-end programmable network platform that seamlessly and securely connects you to the cloud and in between where you operate in public and private clouds. This means you can implement security that covers your data traffic from when it leaves your organisation to when it returns.

An effective way to throw a protective ring around the inside of your network is by adopting Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions. These counteract threat-actor behaviour to defend the information or resources they seek. SIEM solutions take a holistic approach to monitoring your cyber threats and consolidating your data and security information in real-time.

Our advisory services can help your organisation define tailored plans to support you in the discovery of information assets, classification, labelling and protection. Our experts can also guide you in defining access policies to implement into your controls. Plus, our SIEM and SOC services can analyse telemetry from your IT assets.

Our experts can also take you through the possibilities of Global Fabric, our infrastructure that stitches together cloud-like operational flexibility, cost optimisation, enhanced application performance and data sovereignty compliance, built-in security and increased sustainability.

I mentioned earlier how cyber threats are growing rapidly in sophistication and volume. Can your cyber defence tools keep pace?

There are two stages to establishing this: first, view the market to understand the range of tools and services available to help your business into the future and second, make sure you’re choosing cyber tools that can evolve as cyber threats do.

A further consideration about your cyber tech is how automated threat management can support your security. Automation and AI are increasingly necessary to defend against cyber threats. Automated threat management has significant value in identifying what assets are under attack and determining the likely risk of compromise this could bring. It can cut through the noise generated by hundreds of thousands of attacks to highlight serious incidents that need rapid remediation. 

We’ve drawn on our expertise and experience as a managed service provider to create our sophisticated defence platform, Eagle-i. This is our transformational cyber security platform, a solution designed to sit over the top of existing managed security services, overlaying actionable intelligence to enhance and coordinate defence efforts.

Eagle-i uses AI and automation to predict, detect and neutralise security threats before they can inflict damage, combined with our industry-leading threat intelligence. Eagle-i self-learns from the intelligence provided by each intervention, constantly improving its threat knowledge and dynamically refining how it protects your organisation across a multi-cloud environment.

No cyber security defences can be impenetrable, so it makes sense to plan for a breach to recover quickly and minimise the damage, preventing data loss, financial losses and customer dissatisfaction. The starting point is understanding the consequences of an attack and then working out the best defence mechanisms to avoid a breach in the first place.

This involves developing a plan that includes processes, roles, responsibilities, communication guidelines and contingencies, and practising it so teams will automatically go into defence mode and act rapidly.

Our Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions effectively tackle these situations. They bring together next-generation antivirus with threat hunting and threat intelligence on the endpoint device, constantly analysing events to identify malicious behaviour.