Data collection and protection are most important for businesses today. You need to ensure that customer information is safe and secure or you risk damaging your reputation or even lose your business.
In this context, IT security should be a priority for any business that deals with data and sensitive information. To tackle security issues more efficiently, you need to understand the correlation between three main components inIT security – vulnerability, threat, and risk.
What is an IT security threat?
A threat is an incident that could potentially harm the system or the company overall. Threats can be divided into three categories:
- Natural threats – hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, etc.
- Unintentional threats – such as employees accessing the wrong information
- Intentional threats – malware, spyware, adware companies
Viruses are threats because they can expose your company to an automated attack. Cybercriminals constantly come up with new ways to compromise data and many times threats can be challenging to control or identify in advance. You need to ensure that your team is up-to-date with current trends in cybersecurity and perform regular threat assessments and penetration testing to discover vulnerabilities and protect the system against different types of threats.
What is an IT security vulnerability?
A vulnerability is a known weakness in the system that can be exploited by hackers. This can be cases such as a former employee forgetting to disable access to external accounts or change logins. Most vulnerabilities are exploited by automated attackers and it is crucial to ensure the security of the system by constantly testing for vulnerabilities.
You need to identify the weak points and create a response strategy. For example, determine whether your data is caked up in a secure location, how your cloud-based data is being protected, what anti-virus programs are you using, and do you have a data recovery plan in terms of a security attack.
What is an IT security risk?
Risk is the potential for damages due to a threat exploiting a vulnerability. Risks can include financial loss, loss of privacy, damaged reputation, legal implications, and so on. Having a risk management plan is one way to reduce the potential for risks.
In order to do so, you need to recognize the breaches that are most important. This should be done on a regular basis. Determine a dedicated group of employees responsible for risk management and implement controls and policies to ensure that users know about any changes.
Constantly oversee and assess the effectiveness of your policy and control. There are constant changes in the sources of risks so you and your team must always be prepared to adjust the framework. This also means that you need to follow all current trends in IT security and new tools available on the market that can potentially improve your system and reduce the risks.
You need to understand these security components accurately to be able to create an effective framework to find and manage potential vulnerabilities, reduce the possibilities of threats and minimize the risk.
