If your organization has network security vulnerabilities, they can result in serious consequences for your business.
Security vulnerabilities can lead to cyberattacks and data breaches that can cause significant network downtime, cost your organization hundreds of thousands of dollars to repair your network and result in compromised data.
Cyberattacks and data breaches can also result in permanent network damage. For this reason, it is important for your organization to prioritize network security to prevent these results from happening.
Coeo understands how important reliable network security is and has delivered thousands of network security solutions to organizations to improve their security and help them avoid cyberattacks and data breaches.
By the end of this article, you will understand what risk-based security is, how to implement it in your network, and whether it is an appropriate strategy for your organization.
What is risk-based security?
Risk-based security identifies risks inside a network and mitigates them. Risk-based security prioritizes resources and data and applies security based on the level of risk and the importance of the data.
Risk-based security enables you to improve your risk-based vulnerability management to improve overall security and patch vulnerabilities in your network.
Risk-based vulnerability management is a process that enables security teams to identify, categorize, and remediate critical vulnerabilities before attackers can take advantage and ruin network infrastructure.
However, vulnerability management has significantly evolved over the last few years with the changing security landscape and more advanced network threats.
Today, traditional vulnerability management and security solutions cannot identify all vulnerabilities within a network, especially in remote or hybrid work environments where the network is more dispersed.
The growing number of sophisticated and advanced network vulnerabilities and potential security weaknesses have resulted in the need for risk-based security.
If you would like to speak with our team to learn more about risk-based security or other security solutions that can improve your network performance and security or ask any questions you may have you can schedule an appointment.
How to improve risk-based security
Risk-based security improves network security and enables you to detect and mitigate threats when they are present in your network. Some of the ways to improve risk-based security include:
Identify and prioritize risks and vulnerabilities
Network vulnerabilities are weaknesses in your network security that can be exploited to breach security and steal or damage key assets in the network.
To address these vulnerabilities, organizations need to consider both internal and external factors that could pose risks such as security vulnerabilities, technological failure, and human error.
It is important to identify these risks and vulnerabilities and prioritize them based on the likelihood of an attack and the potential impact on the organization.
Reporting on the potential risks and vulnerabilities within your network and ranking each of them from highest to lowest level of severity can help prioritize which risks and vulnerabilities to address first.
Factors such as the value of the asset and compliance requirements should all be considered when ranking the severity of these risks and vulnerabilities to avoid severe network damage.
Allocate resources
Allocating resources appropriately, such as technology, personnel, and budget improves risk-based security. Improving network security by applying risk-based security, however, requires some work internally.
For this reason, it is important to assign responsibilities to install and manage this solution and invest the necessary resources into the security to remove risks in your network.
It is also important to focus these resources on the most significant risks that pose the greatest threat to your network and mitigate them first and from there move on to the next threat.
It is important that these resources align with the objectives of the business to provide a risk-based security service that aligns with the overall strategy.
Implement security controls
It is important that your organization sets up the proper security controls for your security.
These security controls should be proportionate to the risks that are identified by your organization to help provide effective security against those threats.
This enables your team to set personalized security controls that combat the threats around your network improving your security vulnerabilities.
Is risk-based security an appropriate strategy for your organization?
Now you understand what risk-based security is and the ways to improve risk-based security. However, it is important that your organization understands whether risk-based security is an appropriate strategy for your network.
If your organization is trying to improve your network security and is looking to avoid cyberattacks and malicious actors from damaging your network, risk-based security may be right for your organization.
For organizations that have detected potential risks and vulnerabilities within your network, risk-based security may be a good solution to help identify and mitigate these risks and avoid damage to your network.
Lastly, if your organization is looking to implement better security controls to avoid cyberattacks and data breaches, risk-based security may be an appropriate strategy to improve security and patch vulnerabilities.
However, if your organization has reliable security already or prefers a perimeter-based or cloud-based security model, a risk-based security model may not improve or accomplish your objectives so integrating firewalls or a SASE solution may produce a better result instead.
Implementing risk-based network security in your organization
Now you understand what risk-based network security is, how to improve risk-based security, and whether it is the right strategy for your organization. This will help you understand how to achieve your risk-based security objectives.
Organizations can’t operate effectively with network security vulnerabilities that result in threats like cyberattacks and data breaches that lead to compromised data and can cost your organization hundreds of thousands of dollars to repair the network following an attack.
Additionally, some attacks can result in permanent network damage. For this reason, network security should be a top priority for all organizations.
Coeo understands how important reliable network security is and has delivered thousands of network security solutions to organizations to improve their security vulnerabilities and help them avoid cyberattacks.
We want you to understand what risk-based security is and whether it is a good strategy so you can determine if your organization should invest in this type of network protection.
If you would like to speak with our team to learn more about risk-based security or other security solutions that can improve your network performance and security or ask any questions you may have you can schedule an appointment.
Now that you understand the ways to achieve risk-based security and whether it is an appropriate strategy for your organization, read this article to learn about the different types of vulnerabilities and how to avoid them:
