Everyone likes a cool tool or a nifty gadget that makes their life easier, and this applies from the kitchen to the garage, workshop to office. We’ve all bought something new, fancy, or novel, and then found that, after a few weeks, that vegetable ricer, magnetic Torx wrench set or novelty desk calendar was a waste of money. The same applies to cybersecurity tools. Without the knowledge—or the buying strategy—tools can be wasted purchases that end up sitting on the shelf gathering dust.
In this article, we’re going to guide you through a few helpful processes to identify the cybersecurity tools you need to meet your organization’s own unique requirements. We’ll use some common frameworks, helping you understand what’s needed to secure your small or midsize business (SMB). The checklists and essentials listed below are intended to give you a quick, practical view of what might be needed at a level that works for business decision makers—and then informs the technical team as to what’s needed. Let’s dive in.
Identifying your Small Business’s Cybersecurity Needs
If you are starting with a clean sheet of paper, refreshing your estate, or even inheriting a predecessor’s cybersecurity set-up, it’s worth understanding the current state.
Begin with assessing the current cybersecurity posture by looking at what incidents have been recorded or reported, and what the outcomes were. If the first alert came from a watchful employee or some of the technical defenses the company has, that’s a good sign. Less good: when the first alert is an actual breach or successful ransomware encryption, or if there’s no signs of suspicious activity at all—not even false positives.
These early indicators aside, your current cybersecurity posture should encompass the risks that could damage your business, the potential threat vectors by which that could happen, and how your organization’s existing defenses are arrayed to prevent such occurrences. We’re already run down a list of the types of cybersecurity threats small businesses face, and Verizon’s 2024 Data Breach Investigation Report (DBIR) makes the point that small organizations’ attack surfaces are now very similar to those of the largest companies. In 2023, the report identified 92% of breaches of organizations with fewer than 1,000 employees were the result of system intrusion, social engineering, and basic web application attacks. This is a good starting point—but it’s important your organization understands that its attack surface may be different, and therefore the potential reason for breaches may be different, too.
Once there’s an understanding on posture and attack surface, the next steps should be to understand and, if necessary, update policies and training. This should be followed up with the implementation of cybersecurity tools and solutions, which will need to be monitored, updated and renewed as time goes by.
Understanding your current state is valuable, and once you’ve got an understanding, the next step is to look at the Five Cs of cybersecurity.
What Are the Five Cs of Cybersecurity?
Here’s the five cyber bullet points you need to know:
- Change
- Continuity
- Cost
- Compliance
- Coverage
Each one of these is a critical capability your organization must have—or be capable of—in order to continue thriving in the face of cyber threats.
Change
We’ve talked about threat surfaces. But understanding, adapting, and responding positively to change is critical. In this context, that means gaining visibility of new threats— whether they’re new actors or attackers, changes in the attack surface, fresh vulnerabilities, or supply chain updates.
Continuity
It’s likely your business already has a business continuity plan of some sort to prepare for common eventualities. Emergencies such as storm damage, loss of power, or fire are commonly planned for, and cyber attacks should also be on the list. Understanding what needs to happen to keep your business going during a cyber attack, and how to recover afterwards in as efficient and painless way as possible, is critical.
Cost
This next point very much depends on what your organization regards as an acceptable level of risk—and that’s something said without judgment. It’s possible to spend a great deal of money on cyber defenses, and at some point the cost outweighs the risk involved. Your budget is finite, and it makes sense to ensure that every cent allocated to small business cybersecurity solutions goes to the right investments.
Compliance
Regulatory compliance can tip the scales towards heftier budgets and a more risk-averse approach in some cases. Significant financial penalties and other enforcement actions are increasingly used to oblige some sectors to beef up their cybersecurity. Look for the regulations and standards your business is required to keep to.
Coverage
It’s all well and good putting your eggs in one basket marked Regulatory Compliance —but that will leave every other area unprotected. The challenge here is to ensure comprehensive protection across all areas of the business to avoid weak spots.
Five Cyber Essentials for Your Small or Midsize Business
There are five basic tenets of good cybersecurity to apply to your organization, and each is interlinked. Once you’ve covered the Five Cs above, the relative values and requirements for each of these essentials is going to be easier to calculate.
Risk Management
We’ve already touched on the issue of business risk, and cyber risk is now a key factor for many business leaders. Understanding cyber risk can be tricky—and it’s vital that both the business and technical leaders can talk about cyber risk in language that works for both sides. The practice of identifying, assessing, and mitigating cyber risk is valuable for everyone, and there is plenty of talk (and plenty of buying options) around cyber risk quantification.
Incident Response
If they can afford it, most organizations outsource some or all of their incident response capabilities to specialist providers. It’s also wise to look at readiness—a common acronym to look for is Incident Readiness and Response (IRR). Regardless, having a plan for what to do if it all goes wrong and an incident occurs is part of good business continuity planning. It is also, regardless of how much you outsource, something you need to prepare for from a business perspective.
Security Awareness
There’s an awful lot of talk about the human element of a cyber attack, and it is absolutely critical—not least because social engineering remains a popular and effective means of establishing access for attackers. Building, fostering, and maintaining a culture of security awareness among employees remains one of the most effective (and cost-effective) means to protect your business from attacks.
Data Protection
Regulatory compliance is one part of this, but another is the simple need to avoid losing sensitive business and customer data. It might be intellectual property, it might be a customer list complete with sensitive information such as banking details, SSNs, and other personal data; regardless, protecting data is an existential requirement for many businesses.
Network Security
High impact cyber attacks often involve network compromise; with unfettered access to your company’s networks, an attacker can move from endpoint to endpoint, snoop traffic and cause utter mayhem. Protecting the integrity and usability of your company’s networks before, during, and after an incident is our final essential.
Basic Small Business Cybersecurity Solutions ?
The basics are effective for a reason—and the following tools make excellent starting points once you’ve established your business’ risk profile, attack surface, and budget.
Endpoint security and the tooling that comes with it—Endpoint Protection (EPP) and Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)—are cost-effective and deliver measurable benefits.
Firewalls, and next generation firewalls, remain useful and a baseline security requirement for organizations. The same goes for Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), especially in an era of mobile and remote work. Corporate Wifi networks should have strong encryption and hidden SSIDs as a matter of course.
The same goes for antivirus (AV) tools; these are a baseline requirement and it is worth spending time evaluating the various options available on the market—not just for detection capabilities, but also for performance and interoperation with other existing or planned tool purchases.
Coupled with this, multi-factor authentication (MFA) and strong, enforced password policies can do a world of good. Regular updates—mandated and, preferably, automated will also establish a baseline security regime and reduce the risk of unpatched systems falling victim to known exploits and vulnerabilities.
Finally, regular security audits that look for and address issues, weaknesses, and gaps are a must.
Other Considerations
Aside from regulatory requirements such as PCI-DSS, there are strong arguments for encrypting data at rest and in transit. Certainly, it can reduce the risk of an attacker stealing and using or selling sensitive information. One caution on this is that encrypted network traffic looks the same whether it’s hostile or benign, meaning that any searches for malicious or suspicious traffic by defenders or monitoring tools may difficult.
There’s a clearer case for access control, network segmentation, backups, and more recently, Data Loss Prevention (DLP). Now hitting the mainstream and reaching new levels of affordability, DLP identifies and alerts or prevents the unsafe sharing of sensitive information. It’s particularly useful as organizations increasingly share data across clouds, applications, endpoints, and supply chain partners.
One last thing: we mentioned shelfware at the top of this article, and it’s vital to look at what tools—and therefore what capabilities—you’ve already invested in. It may be that utilities, capabilities, and services that you purchased for one task or requirement can be re-used or extended to tackle another issue. Mapping the capabilities of what you already have to hand will help reduce the length of any cyber tool grocery list you may have already built.
Conclusion
If this feels like a whirlwind tour, then you’d be right. It’s difficult to sum up all of the facts and factors involved in choosing tools to protect your business from cyber attack. But applying a decision-making framework such as the one we’ve described to your cybersecurity tool buying and maintenance process will help you build and maintain a proactive approach to cybersecurity.
Protect Your Business Today
SMBs around the globe have turned to SentinelOne Singularity™ Control to proactively resolve modern threats at machine speed. Book a meeting to see how SentinelOne can help you protect your business against every kind of threat, including ransomware and malware.
