Pass Your Next Security Audit with These Helpful Tips

Though they strike fear in the hearts of many people, audits aren’t inherently a bad thing. They help you adhere to stringent compliance regulations, as well as to avoid legal repercussions that stem from them.

In a more immediate sense, they also help you to defend your sensitive information from cyber attacks and hackers. After all, a direct cyber attack can cost businesses as much as $40,000 per hour. But with the proper preparation, your business could benefit greatly from security audits.

We’ve come up with the two most helpful tips to help you pass your next security audit with flying colors.

Establish a security policy base

First and foremost, your organization should establish thorough security policies. These policies need to be dynamic; they must consider the ever-changing nature of modern technology. With each new piece of software comes new exploitable vulnerabilities. With a solidified security plan, you’ll have a better chance at minimizing or completely avoiding the effects of a cyber attack.

These security policies should cover several different facets of your organization. These can include:

• User training

It’s an unfortunate fact; the biggest risk to the cybersecurity of a company is the end user. The most popular password, making up nearly 17 percent of the 10 million passwords analyzed by Keeper Security, was “123456.” With an easy-to-guess password, hackers can quickly enter into a user’s account and wreak havoc without much effort.

User training is vital to avoiding these attacks. With a consistent company-wide training on a regular basis, you can keep all employees up-to-date and protected from the newest threats crawling across the internet and their Inboxes.

• Update policies

You need to ensure that all software is always running on the latest available version. All security audits will check for proper software versions. Though this can be tedious and time-consuming to enforce, it is a necessary part of maintaining compliance with industry regulations.

• Unique accounts

Individual accounts for both programs and devices should never be shared. The sharing of these accounts invites the compromisation of information and possible data breaches. It’s absolutely critical that each user has their own account for whatever they need access to.

Additionally, accounts need to have their permissions set properly. In other words, each user should only have access to what they need – and never more.

Put your policies to the test

Your security policies may be established, but they’re useless without proper testing. That’s exactly why you need to put them through their paces constantly and randomly. By doing so, you’re making sure they’re always ready to defend against cyber attacks. But what’s the best way to test them?

A common way to test is to run an internal phishing test. With this test, you’re essentially baiting your employees into giving you sensitive information. Those that fail the test should go back for more training on end-user security, and those that pass should be rewarded for their proper following of security protocols.

The easiest way to pass a security audit

It’s absolutely necessary to both establish a security policy base and to test them. However, it’s not as simple as it appears. Before they can work efficiently, individual security policies need to be tested and tweaked. The tests that they undergo must be completely thorough while utilizing the techniques that modern cybercriminals would implement.
With our help, you can do all that with ease. We’ll help you establish and enforce proper security rules that will protect your company data. We’ve helped countless companies create plans that have passed security audits without a hitch. If you’d like to know more about how we can help you pass your next security audit, feel free to reach out to us today.