It’s never been a more exciting time to be a start-up. With digital channels offering plentiful scope for expansion and sophisticated new business technologies empowering greater productivity and efficiency than ever before, there’s every reason to embrace your entrepreneurial spirit and pursue your business ambitions. But with reward comes risk, and in this day and age, that primarily means cyber threats. While digital technologies have the potential to empower near-exponential growth, so too can they increase your enterprise’s cyber exposure, and new risks are emerging all the time so it’s essential to implement a comprehensive strategy to enhance its resiliency. Here, we’ll discuss some key practices that can help you to do just that.
Leverage AI in cybersecurity
When it comes to keeping your start-up resilient, one of the biggest challenges you will have to contend with is the evolving nature of the modern threat landscape. New threats and vulnerabilities are constantly emerging as cyber adversaries seek to develop new ways to mount attacks on businesses and exploit them. Moreover, as attackers’ methods become more sophisticated and fast-acting, there is a pressing need for greater responsiveness when it comes to cyber defense. We’ve reached a point where AI-powered solutions are no longer a luxury in security, but a necessity.
In particular, leveraging AI for cybersecurity validation is especially important nowadays, and this is what automated security validation (ASV) platforms do. These tools can monitor your company networks and systems and validate your security controls on a continuous basis. This helps to facilitate resilience in a couple of critical ways.
Firstly, as these platforms utilize up-to-date threat libraries and mimic the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of threat actors, they effectively stress-test your security controls under the conditions of real-world attacks, enabling you to identify, and remediate vulnerabilities to avoid incidents. Additionally, by continuously monitoring your networks, ASV tools can provide constant visibility over your attack surface in a way that point-in-time security tests simply can’t. This means enable your security team can identify signs of compromise early on to detect and protect against cyberattacks more effectively.
Aside from the direct security advantages, automated security validation tools also offer the benefit of scalability. This means that by implementing this technology, you can effectively future-proof your organization’s defenses so you can continually expand your operations without worrying about your security team becoming overburdened.
Prioritise data recovery planning
As a start-up entrepreneur, your risk-taking, growth-oriented mindset is often your greatest strength, but in order to create a truly resilience enterprise, that ambition needs to be tempered with some pragmatism and contingency planning. Specifically, we’re talking about contingency planning and data security and recovery, because regardless of the nature of your business, no organization is immune to disruptions from threats like ransomware, DDoS attacks, data breaches, and data loss.
Data recovery planning is a cornerstone of any good recovery plan, so you should put reliable backup and restoration mechanisms in place. This means setting up cloud storage facilities and potentially also redundant offline storage infrastructure in a separate location from that of your primary premises.
Moreover, backups should also be automated and configured at a frequency appropriate to the nature of your business. For instance, if your business regularly handles high volumes of customer information or transactional data, then recovery frequency could be as low as several minutes, whereas a business with fewer changes in data might only require daily backups. This will ensure that you will always have access to clean, intact, and up-to-date data backup to restore from so that a potential incident will have minimal impact on operational continuity.
Establish a culture of vigilance and collaboration
Security and recovery technologies can play a vital role in securing the longevity of your start-up, but they are only effective when implemented within a company culture that emphasizes digital resilience.
Creating such a culture requires complete buy-in and accountability from everyone in your organization, from leadership and management to developers, security, marketing, and sales. As such, there needs to be clear directives that delineate how employees can work securely in their roles.
Staff should be provided with orientation and awareness training to understand pertinent risks such as malware and social engineering, as well as what practices to follow in order to minimize those risks. Additionally, all employees should be made aware of what indicators of compromise might look like in relation to their roles and what protocols to follow should they identify a potential threat. In addition, your organization should ideally seek to incorporate security principles into development workflows, where relevant.
By embedding security principles into the culture of your enterprise and encouraging all departments to take accountability in cyber defense, you can promote cross- create an organization that is hypervigilant to threats, thereby enhancing digital resilience.
Build a resilient future for your start-up
Building a resilient start-up requires more than just creativity and ambition – it requires foresight, diligence, preparedness, and accountability, which is why these practices are so essential. By leveraging AI in security validation, establishing robust backup and recovery processes, and creating a culture that prioritizes vigilance and collaboration, you can assemble a framework that fosters digital resilience so that you can pursue your start-up ambitions unfettered.
