Cyber threats affect various industries and businesses with a wide variety of physical, electronic, and digital assets, including:

• Software and hardware-based information and communications infrastructure and systems
• National Defense systems
• Computing systems

The National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications provides guidance to business and government on cyber threats and security measures. Their guidance is focused on organizations that host critical information, such as those in the U.S. federal government, the financial, health care, or automotive sectors.

Information Security: Keep it Safe

If you don’t take basic precautions to protect your network, information and systems, a cyber security threat could still jeopardize your organization’s security, knowledge, productivity and reputation.

As you can see, even companies like Fortinet agree that cyber security is important, and you should not be complacent. Organizations have to balance the need to keep systems secure with other concerns. How you do this is up to you, as a leader, a consultant, or a manager. At a minimum, make sure that employees are aware of a wide variety of threats that exist. Make sure that information systems are secured at every level, including:

1. Systems, applications, and servers
2.  
3. Trusted locations
4.  
5. Apps, mobile applications, messaging services, and cloud services
6.  
7. Sophisticated detection capabilities
8.  
9. Customer relationships
10.  
11. Business process control mechanisms

Monitoring and reporting tools

This strategy can only succeed when people throughout the company are trained to recognize and react to these incidents and take steps to protect the company. In this regard, you can gain invaluable information from the experiences of businesses that have successfully faced cyber security threats.

For more information, see “Cybersecurity Threats and Strategies” on the National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications’ (NCSC) website.