5 Security Measures You Need to Protect Your IT Infrastructure - FirstLight (2024)

Cybercriminals are always dreaming up new attack vectors. Their endless ingenuity means your company needs to be tirelessly vigilant to prevent a breach. One security tool or approach won’t cut it in today’s challenging threat landscape, especially as mobilizing a remote workforce has created more points of vulnerability.

As cyberattacks evolve, gaining sophistication over time, a comprehensive and multilayered approach to IT infrastructure security becomes necessary. A wide array of security tools needs to be in place to protect all parts of your IT infrastructure from a variety of threats.

Here’s a look at 5 security measures your business should have in place:

1) Ransomware Protection/DRaaS

Ransomware continues to present a formidable threat to organizations and businesses in all kinds of industries. Hackers use malware to encrypt company files, effectively shutting down all systems, and then try to extort money in return for an encryption key.

Whether victims of ransomware decide to pay up or not, these attacks are expensive. According to technology news site CRN, ransomware attacks in 2020 have cost companies $144.2 million for investigation, prevention, and paying ransoms. Government agencies, law firms, and financial organizations are among the victims.

Protecting your organization against ransomware requires that you be prepared to recover if ransomware infects your files. Data must be backed up off-site to prevent on-premises backups from being deleted. Equally important is to have a Disaster Recovery plan that provides a DR site that allows your company to keep working while also losing as little data as possible. Disaster Recovery as a service (DRaaS) provides these off-site backups through replication, as well as instant failover through the cloud.

2) DDoS Protection

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are particularly devastating during the pandemic because companies are relying on their network connections to support the entire workforce. DDoS attacks flood the network with queries, preventing users from accessing the system. One attack could incapacitate your remote employees.

DDoS protection prevents an attack by monitoring network traffic and using algorithms to identify suspicious activity and mitigate potential attacks. DDoS protection leverages machine learning to filter the network, sends alerts, and keeps records of incident mitigation.

3) Continuous Data Protection (CDP)

To recover quickly and completely from a cyberattack, your company must meet its recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs). Every time changes are made to data and files, it creates the potential for losing vital information if a downtime event were to occur, depriving your company of the real-time data needed for accurate decision making.

Continuous data protection ensures that data is being replicated and stored in real time. Every change in information is preserved, capturing a current and complete picture. With CDP, the gap between the last backup and the point of recovery closes, allowing all data to be recovered.

4) Firewall as a Service

Companies have been using firewalls for a long time to keep hackers from entering the system perimeter through the network. Now that many organizations have moved their data and applications to the cloud, they need to take a new approach to firewall.

Next-gen firewalls must protect data and applications in a system that lacks defined perimeters. Firewall as a service (FWaaS) allows companies to gather information about traffic from a variety of sources into the cloud to gain full visibility. Security policies, such as access and authentication controls, can be applied uniformly across locations, even those of remote users.

5) Monitoring Solution

Being vigilant means monitoring every aspect of your IT infrastructure. You need to gain full visibility into the network, devices, and applications to detect suspicious activity and to prevent an attack.

Monitoring allows you to track performance so you can detect any anomalies, such as lags in performance that may signal a potential attack. Alerts make responding to and preventing attacks easier and faster. By monitoring the IT infrastructure, you can be proactive about security.

A Smart Approach to Comprehensive Security

Making sure your company has all the security tools it needs can be tricky. Using an array of disjointed security solutions may result in a fragmented and difficult-to-manage strategy. Working with a technology provider that offers all the security solutions you need makes a comprehensive strategy possible.

FirstLight provides all the security solutions your company needs to defend against cyberattacks in today’s risk-intensive landscape. We offer DDoS Protection, DRaaS, Monitoring, Firewall as a Service, and much more. Our security solutions are robust, affordable, and supported by our high-speed, low-latency fiber optic network.

Get the details on FirstLight Managed Firewall. Access our solution brief.