by Jeremy Miller, Technician
Most companies have an IT service provider or an IT department to take care of all of the IT needs of the company.
These technicians can easily address any issues that arise. Most issues are not addressed until they become known and are reported to the IT service provider either from the person having the issue or monitoring software they have installed.
It is best to have your IT service provider run an assessment once or even better twice a year.
This can make you and your IT provider aware of any security issues that are not easily monitored or would cost too much to monitor.
A security audit can be implemented for a number of reasons.
Some organizations are required to have them if the information they are using needs to be secure based on a compliance standard such as HIPPA or PCI.
Every day new vulnerabilities are discovered and it is too time consuming to test every device on every network for each security risk that is discovered as they are discovered.
This is where the security audit shines; it can be used to check for any known vulnerability on every device on your network.
Even with all of the security software commonly installed on all business computers such as anti-virus, service checks, and patch management there can still be security risks running behind the scenes that can be detrimental to your company.
A security assessment can let you know if any software is using an insecure port to an employee’s malicious actions.
It can show you if an application is using more bandwidth than it should, which may be causing other issues on your network.
Security assessments are the best tools to test for data leakage. Data loss is every businesses problem. Significant data loss causes a business to fail almost 70% of the time.
There are other times beside annually that it is good to get a security assessment. It would be best to get them before and after changing IT providers.
It is good to get one after any large installation or migration. This can be a business application, hardware such as new computers or a new server or even a physical migration such as moving to a new location or building an addition.
Security assessments are increased in effectiveness when you run a baseline security assessment. A baseline security assessment is when you run an assessment before you do any changes to your current IT setup.
This will let you know where you are before any changes are made. You can then have a comparison to verify that your security is improving.
A baseline security assessment will also let you know what vulnerabilities you need to address. Some of these vulnerability issues can be quite costly to repair and are great to plan for.
The sooner you get an assessment the sooner you will be able to make informed decisions based on your actual network risks security requirements.
Everyone’s security needs are different; we can assist you with any questions or concerns that you may have about security assessments.