The modern digital world is a reality now, where data breaches are indeed a reality. Compared to earlier years, the global scene of data breaches showed a notable rise in 2024. IT Governance UK reports that 9,498 publicly reported events compromised approximately 35.9 billion known records. On average, the cost of a data breach has increased to $4.88 million. A data breach can be catastrophic for small and medium businesses when it comes to the costs of a data breach.
There is no question that companies will be under pressure to ensure their data security increase in sophistication of cyber threats. While it demands resources, a breach that puts your organization at risk is an infinitely less expensive tradeoff than getting breached. In this article, actionable advice will be given on how other companies can improve their security to protect themselves from future breaches.
Conduct Risk Assessments
The first thing companies can do is to start getting their facilities through cyber risk assessments that will uncover the vulnerabilities of your network, applications, and security policies. That risk assessment is an involved audit performed internally or at least through a third-party cybersecurity firm. The objective is to systematically analyze the security process to discover weaknesses that attackers could exploit.
Risk assessment activities include penetration testing, vulnerability scanning, social engineering tests, and compliance audits. Real hackers use the same tactics to probe networks and applications. Any success requires a breakdown in security controls. With this knowledge, companies can fortify weak spots before criminals become hostile to them.
You can read more here about more practical approaches.
Implement Strong Access Controls
Risk assessments are one of the top recommendations, as are least privilege and role-based access controls. This is about restricting access permissions to only what each user needs to do their job duties. Over 80% of data breaches start with the abuse of privileged credentials.
To limit insider threats, companies should classify data and system functions by sensitivity levels. Based on roles, employees and third parties should only receive the minimum permissions necessary. Strict approval processes must govern elevated access requests. Session controls should automatically log users out after periods of inactivity. By minimizing unnecessary access, companies shrink the attack surface for insider threats and cybercriminals.
Adopt Zero Trust Security Models
Zero trust has emerged as a new paradigm for enterprise security. Unlike traditional models, which automatically trust users inside the corporate perimeter, zero trust operates under the philosophy of “never trust, always verify”. It protects from threats inside and outside the network.
There are three key principles of zero trust:
- All users must undergo strong authentication before accessing applications and data. Multifactor authentication is recommended, combining something you know (passwords) with something you have (security keys) or something you are (biometrics).
- Devices trying to connect to the network must be verified as secure and compliant before granting access. Checks include posture assessments, antivirus software, encryption, and more.
- All application traffic should be encrypted, and users should be should be limited through granular access controls. Microsegmentation, private access, and software-defined perimeters help minimize lateral movement.
Zero trust shrinks the attack surface by removing implicit trust, enabling threat detection, and reducing blast radius impact.
Keep Software Updated
Aggressive scanning of vulnerable applications that run outdated software is a favorite target for cybercriminals. Regularly, the vendors fill our systems with software updates and patches containing the most essential security fixes for the newly discovered exploits. However, many organizations fail to schedule any updates consistently, leading to preventable attacks.
Companies should inventory all business applications, frameworks, plugins, operating systems, and firmware running across their environment. Centralized patch management tools can automatically scan for missing updates and push deployments across endpoints and servers. Automating this process ensures devices stay consistently updated against the latest threats.
Enabling auto-updates for infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service components offloads the patching burden in cloud environments. Cloud service providers maintain responsibility for securing the underlying layers they provide. However, companies must still manage guest operating systems and application updates within cloud servers.
Train Employees in Security Awareness
Investments in technology won’t stop employees from being a leading attack vector. Phishing, pretexting, baiting, and so forth all induce users to give up credentials or sensitive data. These psychological tactics have become extremely sophisticated in the hands of the cybercriminals.
Companies can cultivate an instinctual security culture and human firewalls once they provide the same training on security awareness through continuous training. Formulas like simulated phishing attacks, gamification, videos, posters, lunch-and-learns, and more explain to employees how to recognize and respond to threats. Some topics should be related to password policies, red flags for social engineering, safe web browsing, mobile security, social media oversharing, and managing data responsibly.
Develop Incident Response Plans
While preventative measures minimize the likelihood of an attack, companies must also prepare for the worst. Developing a formal incident response plan, or IRP, can accelerate detection, minimize damages, and speed recovery if a breach does occur. The goal is to take rapid, coordinated action for containment and restoration of normal operations.
IRPs consist of step-by-step runbooks covering different breach scenarios. They designate response teams and individual responsibilities across IT, legal, PR, HR, executives and other stakeholders. Playbooks outline processes for identifying threats, assessing impact, stopping unauthorized access, eradicating malware, gathering forensic evidence, notifying victims, and interfacing with law enforcement.
Companies should develop their response plan through stress testing by staging simulated incidents. It is a practice with extensive preparation and practice that must be executed smoothly for crisis scenarios.
Secure Endpoints
The attack surface is massive and spread across corporate and home networks, all of which are endpoint devices, including workstations, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Devices, either lost or stolen, are easily compromised with accounts, data, and applications. A network breach can even occur from an infected website or email that pivots into the endpoint to exploit vulnerable endpoints.
To keep endpoints secure, companies should deploy antivirus/anti-malware tools that provide real-time threat defense. Firewalls block unauthorized network traffic, while data loss prevention tools control sensitive data flows. Mobile device management enforces security policies and remotely wipes lost devices. Finally, full disk and removable media encryption protects offline data exposure.
Endpoint security controls are centrally managed solutions that allow easy deployment, monitoring and maintenance of endpoint security controls wherever they are located. Cloud-based tools also provide protection and visibility even to remote and mobile users.
Secure Email Communications
The top vector for phishing attacks and malware delivery is still email. With spoofed emails taking the form of trusted contacts or brands, the users are tricked into releasing the breaches. Insecure email platforms also allow message content and attachments to be intercepted or leaked.
Companies should invest in email security tools that scan incoming messages and attachments for threats. Link analysis checks embedded URLs for spoofed domains used in phishing campaigns. Anti-spam and anti-phishing filters leverage artificial intelligence to recognize telltale attack patterns and quarantine risky emails for review.
To prevent leaks, enable encryption for emails and attachments containing sensitive information. This renders messages unreadable if intercepted by unauthorized parties. For further protection, businesses can deploy user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) to monitor insider threats. UEBA spots abnormal user activity indicative of compromised credentials or rogue behavior.
Implement Backup and Disaster Recovery
Despite strict precautions, there are some data breaches that even cannot be prevented. There is no denying the fact that companies must be ready for the scenario when there is data and system loss, whether from ransomware, destructive cyber attacks, or natural disasters. It helps keep recent backups across its on-premise and cloud environments so that they can be restored after outages.
To minimize data loss, modern data protection tools take incremental backups at 5-minute intervals and so on. Immutable backups with versioning air-gapped from the network prevent ransomware corruption and malicious deletion. Therefore, companies should set up redundant copies at multiple locations to survive hardware failure or site disaster.
Recovery plans should undergo testing to validate system rebuild processes and backup reliability. Companies can stand up in isolated recovery environments without impacting production networks. After validating recovery workflows with simulations, they can confidently restore breached or corrupted systems.
Adopt Cloud Security Best Practices
Migrating business systems to the cloud unlock immense potential for performance, scalability, and cost savings. However, misconfigurations easily undo many of those benefits. Over 90% of cloud data breaches trace back to customer errors in permissions, network rules, and identity policies wthatexpose data.
Companies should leverage cloud access security brokers (CASBs), which overlay visibility, data security, and threat protection onto infrastructure. CASBs spot misconfigured resources flagged for review and secure sensitive data processed by cloud services.
Additional cloud security best practices include:
- Enabling multi-factor authentication for all console and remote access
- Restricting management console and API access to authorized networks/IPs
- Configuring serverless functions to run with minimum privileges
- Encrypting network traffic between cloud resources
- Enabling logging/monitoring to detect suspicious activity
- Setting up user activity monitoring for admins
- Restricting public access to storage containers
Conclusion
In the age of digital ubiquity, data breaches are an inevitable threat, and companies have to accept them. Putting security mechanisms in place, however, reduces the probability of the attack occurring as well as how destructive the attack can be. Networks, endpoints, email, cloud environments and employee behavior are secured in concerted efforts to reduce the attack surface that is available for exploitation. At the same time, plans for detection, response, and recovery make resilience possible in case of incidents that still happen.
New attack techniques keep emerging; thus, companies have to spend the proper resources on continuous security improvements. Although no breaches can be completely prevented, combining technology, processes and people can ensure operations are not destroyed in a catastrophic event. It is imperative that cybersecurity is considered a long-term, ongoing investment for any enterprise’s longevity.
