Why Your Organization and Team Members Need to be #CyberFit

News of security breaches, data loss, and data theft is sadly a daily occurrence. Almost every industry and every size of organization have been hit — including governments, retailers, universities, and healthcare systems. What’s worse, affected businesses suffer both financial and reputational losses while being dragged into the news cycles.

It’s clear that organizations and employees are not CyberFit enough to meet today’s data security and privacy challenges. Let’s look at how the landscape has changed and what organizations need to do to become CyberFit.

More data protection businesses, less effective data protection

Despite the ever-increasing number of data protection and cybersecurity vendors, the headlines keep coming. In fact, in just the last week we heard stories as frightening as:

As those incidents continue to grab headlines, it’s clear there’s a need for Acronis’ cyber protection services, which can reduce the threat posed by such attacks by ensuring the safety, accessibility privacy, authenticity, and security of data (SAPAS, or the Five Vectors of Cyber Protection).

But the question remains – why are these threats growing in scale, frequency, and success?

Too few professionals, too much complexity

One of the top reasons is simply that there are not enough cybersecurity and data protection professionals available. As this article and its survey results highlights, the cybersecurity skills shortage is getting worse. With skilled workers in short supply, it only makes sense that employee negligence is now the biggest cybersecurity risk to US businesses.

Another reason is that ensuring cybersecurity is not an easy job. Many cybersecurity professionals note that complexity is the bane of security – as it often comes with multiple tools, multiple layers, multiple user interfaces, and a lack of integration across tools and configurations. Most of these tools are not easy to learn, implement, or run – even if there were enough cybersecurity professionals available to run them. Hackers exploit this complexity with new methods that leverage AI and massive compute and high-speed networks.

It’s an arms race of skills, AI, compute power, and experience … and the hackers are winning.

Inefficient solutions drain resources

Furthermore, cybersecurity solutions are often not efficient. Organizations claim to spend an average of 5.6% of their overall IT budget on IT security and risk management, yet a Gartner report suggests that figure might be misleading since it is the median of actual security spending, which ranges from approximately 1% to 13% of the IT budget.

“Gartner’s view is that enterprises should be spending between 4% and 7% of their IT budgets on IT security: lower in the range if they have mature systems, higher if they are wide open and at risk. This represents the budget under the control and responsibility of the CISO, and not the ‘real’ or total budget.”

That said, even with all the budget spent and all the tools implemented your organization may not be CyberFit.

How to be CyberFit

A strong cyber protection program needs to be easy, efficient, and secure. Your organization should select a security framework like the NIST Cybersecurity framework (Identify, Product, Detect, Respond, and Recover) and align your tools, tasks, and processes to decrease risk and ensure compliance obligations are met.

What’s more, employees need to be trained thoroughly to be prepared for modern IT needs and threats. Being CyberFit as an organization extends from the C-Suite offices to third-party vendors, and all the way to the employees that only use a single IT tool – an email mailbox.

Being CyberFit requires that the entire chain of IT needs to be ready: From the in-house team or managed service provider, everyone involved in your organization’s IT systems needs to have easy, efficient, and secure tools and comprehensive training to ensure a strong security posture.

Is your organization CyberFit? What about your partners or third-party vendors? Are your customers CyberFit? Are your employees CyberFit? Contact Acronis today and ask us how we can help your organization get CyberFit.

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