Five Cyber Readiness Best Practices

Let SysIntegrity Help You Adopt These Practices to Boost Your Organization’s Cybersecurity


  1. Implement Multifactor Authentication (MFA): Prevention is the best defense. MFA – which requires the use of two or more authentication factors to verify the legitimacy of account access attempts – can prevent 99.9% of attacks.1 MFA should be used for all users all the time to help prevent cybercriminals from accessing a business’s system or infiltrating a network, which can lead to ransomware attacks and other cybercrime schemes perpetrated against an organization.
  2. Keep Systems Up to Date: Make good cyber hygiene part of your plan. Maintaining awareness and control of your IT assets is key. Your cybersecurity plan should include strategies for keeping systems up to date. An unpatched vulnerability is one of the easiest and most common methods used to compromise a computer system or network. It is essential to be prepared. Enable automatic updates where possible, replace unsupported systems and test and deploy available patches quickly.
  3. Use Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR): An EDR solution protects against malicious attacks and can provide far greater capabilities than a traditional antivirus solution. EDR can help protect and monitor every asset in an enterprise network by identifying suspicious activity before the rest of the corporate network is exposed to unnecessary risk. EDR technologies monitor for anomalous behavior on each system rather than simply searching for malware.
  4. Have an Incident Response (IR) Plan: The goal of an IR plan is to provide a clearly defined, focused and coordinated approach to responding to cyber incidents. This will enable the organization to limit the damage and hasten a return to normal. Getting back to business with limited impact after an attack is only one benefit of having a good IR plan. Your IR plan also shows your partners, suppliers and clients that you take cybersecurity seriously.
  5. Back Up Your Data: Make copies of important data and system configurations and protect them. Businesses and organizations typically store many kinds of data, using a variety of computer systems, on networks that may be local, global or somewhere in between. Data on a system or network can include Protected Health Information (PHI), Payment Card Information (PCI), Personally Identifiable Information (PII), intellectual property or other propriety or confidential information.

Backups protect that information against human errors, hardware failures, cyberattacks, power failures and natural disasters, and are one of the most important steps that an organization can take to protect against cyber risks. Backups should be frequent, regular and systematic.