10 Essential Elements to Help You Secure Your Enterprise IT Infrastructure

As the Internet and mobility continue to play increasingly large roles in the business world, the size of necessary enterprise IT setups continues to grow. In order to create a reliable and effective IT infrastructure, organizations need to make sure that they have included these 10 essential elements into their setups:

BUSINESS CONTINUITY

1) Information security policy for the organization: One of the biggest reasons businesses experience cyber attacks and data breaches is because employees don’t fully understand how they are supposed to handle critical data and sensitive files. By creating a clearly defined information security policy and making it available to all employees, organizations stand a much higher chance of protecting their business-critical information. When creating a security policy, it is important to include enterprise objectives for security, goals, departmental responsibilities broken down by job title and how management will support all of these aspects of the policy. With such a clearly stated approach to defense, it will be much easier for employees to manage their data and keep it out of harm’s way.

2) Disaster recovery solution: Employing a disaster recovery solution allows organizations to protect against disruptions of regular operations by ensuring accessibility and reliability of business-critical applications and files.

3) System development and maintenance: Ensuring business critical systems are updated and properly maintained is crucial to running a reliable IT setup. Implementing security throughout all phases of a system’s lifecycle, as well as promptly updating new versions of software and patching any known vulnerabilities will help extend the life of enterprise systems and reduce malicious activity.

4) System recovery tools: Eventually, some aspect of your IT setup will need to be repaired or recovered, and in that event system recovery tools are needed to make the necessary fixes. Luckily for Windows users, the software already comes with a variety of recovery options to make the work easier. Windows Memory Diagnostic, System Image Recovery and System Repair are all available in the Windows menu, but sometimes you need something a bit more powerful. Utilizing a Reboot to Restore feature from solutions like Deep Freeze allows businesses to restart their IT systems and completely restore them with their previously selected settings back in place while erasing and malicious changes that may have been made. Deep Freeze offers enterprises the most reliable way to defend against cyber attacks and malware infections and is an essential element in any IT setup.

Creating an enterprise IT setup requires a variety of different components to be successful.

USER ACCESS

5) Communications and operations management: Implementing strict guidelines for operational procedures allows businesses to improve security and inter-departmental communication. Ensuring the appropriate parties are in control of their systems and are informed when incidents occur, as well as having clearly defined duties for when disruptions take place, helps reduce recovery time and improve effectiveness.

6) Access control: Human error is one of the leading causes of IT problems, and one of the most reliable ways to reduce the likelihood of an employee doing something harmful to an enterprise IT setup is by controlling who has access to what assets. This is especially important when considering bring-your-own-device and enterprise mobility platforms. Given how important computers and cyber applications are to a business, it is critical that organizational structure, roles and processes surrounding IT assets are clearly defined. Controls should be set based on business requirements to ensure that only employees that need to handle certain information have access to it. Using authentication and identity management, businesses can greatly improve their security and dramatically reduce the number of preventable IT intrusions.

IT ASSETS

7) Electricity backup: Perhaps the most important thing to have when creating an enterprise IT setup is electricity. Without it, none of your components will run. To ensure your equipment is connected to a reliable power source, implementing an electricity backup is the best bet. Utilizing emergency power supplies like standby generators allow organizations to access the necessary power needed to keep IT assets running, even during disruptions like storms or power outages.

8) Inventoried IT assets: When creating a successful enterprise IT setup, decision-makers must create a security infrastructure that is able to protect organizational assets using an inventory system. Inventoried assets create accountability and offer great insight as to how applications should be classified, as well as how they should be handled in different scenarios.

9) Spike guards: Many people don’t consider how much electricity is needed to run large scale IT setups, but without massive amounts of power, computer equipment wouldn’t be useable. Because so much electricity is necessary, the chance of voltage spikes is increased, which can cause problems with the power grid and, in turn, your equipment. Employing spike guards helps to protect against such voltage surges, diverting any additional energy over the safe threshold into a protective component to prevent devices from being shorted circuited.

WORKPLACE SECURITY

10) Security controls: Just as a security policy must be clearly defined, so do the security controls in place within the enterprise. There are four main components to security controls:

1. Organizational security – Using a security forum and security officer, as well defining security responsibilities and creating an authorization process and independent review will help to maintain security structure throughout the organization.
2. Personnel security – Cut down on the risks of human error by screening employees computer behavior, as well as defining each employee’s roles and responsibilities in relation to security and offering employee training in cybersecurity. Clearly stating what ramifications exist if employees do not meet expectations in this area will also help to cut down on employee risks.
3. Physical and environmental security – Protect the organization’s assets by properly choosing a facility location, erecting and maintaining a security perimeter and implementing access control and protecting equipment.
4. Compliance – It is especially important to ensure that your organization is in compliance with regulatory, contractual and statutory requirements by using the proper technical controls and system audits, as well as having legal awareness about each systems and software in use within the company.