Smaller companies are also the target of cyber attacks. If your IT budget is limited, security monitoring can contribute to greater security.
Too small to be attractive to hackers? This self-deception no longer works because cybercriminals now use a wide range of attack strategies. If just one attack is successful, it can threaten the company's entire existence.
Security despite tight budgets
But what if the budget for effective protective measures is limited? Wolfgang Kurz, managing director and founder of indevis, cites security monitoring as a possible answer - a lot can be achieved even with a small budget.
The fear of hacker attacks is growing: According to a recent study by Gothaer Versicherung, 48 percent of small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) currently rate a cyber attack as the most threatening scenario for their business. For good reason: Almost every third of the approximately 3,5 million SMEs in Germany have experienced an attack in recent years, says a survey by the research and consulting institute Sirius Campus - with damage in the high five-digit range. And the digital association Bitkom states: 45 percent of the companies surveyed now even fear for their existence. A year ago it was just nine percent.
Increasing dangers and high cost pressure
The Siri Campus survey also shows that medium-sized businesses were affected by cyber attacks at an above-average rate. However, that doesn't mean smaller businesses are safe. As larger companies expand their defense mechanisms against cyberattacks, smaller companies become even more targeted. They have repeatedly served as a gateway: If hackers have gained access to your IT network, they can break into better-guarded companies via existing IT interfaces. The consequences of a successful attack can be serious: companies cannot serve their customers, employees cannot access emails or the company network. Accounting and customer service are paralyzed and business partners are spied on. Operational disruptions that last several days are also possible.
Although companies worldwide are investing increasingly large proportions of their IT budgets in security measures - according to statista, the proportion in Germany rose from 20 percent in 2021 to 24 percent in 2022 - inflation and general price increases are not leaving them unscathed. However, anyone who currently has difficulty raising the budget for comprehensive security measures need not despair. Even smaller precautions such as the implementation of good security monitoring can make a decisive contribution to security.
Security monitoring uses firewall data
Many companies already use system monitoring to monitor the functionality of their IT infrastructure. Specific system values such as temperature, memory utilization or network latency are measured. Security monitoring has a different focus: Essentially, it creates a complex and comprehensive picture of a company's security posture based on its firewall data. It not only looks at whether the systems are “healthy”, but also whether they are secure and whether there are signs of possible or already existing attacks. The tool does this by connecting and analyzing data in real time to quickly identify emerging threats. In this way, the flood of warning messages that security managers receive from their firewalls can be significantly reduced and so-called “alert fatigue” can be prevented – a dangerous desensitization to warning messages.
Gradually expand analyses
Implementing a software tool for security monitoring can make a decisive contribution to the cybersecurity of IT infrastructures and is a practical way, especially for companies with smaller budgets, to increase their cyber resilience. For companies that want to go further and have neither the time nor human resources to operate a security monitoring solution, Managed Detection and Response (MDR) is the next logical and strategic step. Good providers offer MDR as a connection service for security monitoring. Companies can then also integrate other internal and external data sources into the monitoring.
All of this data comes together in the SOC (Security Operations Center) of the external service provider commissioned and experienced security experts evaluate it using a powerful SIEM (Security Information and Event Management). They filter out false alarms, identify actual threats and can immediately initiate or recommend countermeasures. The specialists also improve the quality of the analyzes by enriching the existing database with global threat intelligence feeds. This gives you an even more precise overview of possible threats. In this way, companies can easily secure their networks according to the current state of the art. Because in a world where cyber threats have become the new norm, proactive protection for businesses is no longer a luxury but a life insurance policy.
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About Indivis
Certified according to the international standard ISO/IEC 27001, indevis GmbH is one of Germany's leading Managed Security Service Providers (MSSP). The company has been setting security standards in information technology for over 20 years and offers customers of all sizes and industries suitable IT security solutions for networks, data centers and cloud.
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