What is IT Security?
IT security is your company’s set of strategies whose purpose is to stop unauthorized access to sensitive or critical resources such as your data, devices, and networks. These strategies help your private information stay private and away from curious eyes and malicious hackers, thus maintaining confidentiality.
For example, if your company wanted to maintain its internet gateways’ security, a simple strategy would reduce the number of external connections to your organization’s network. To do this, your typical traffic patterns should be understood well enough that abnormal traffic patterns are fairly easy to detect. Your cybersecurity strategies would then indicate how to respond to such behavior, unauthorized entry, or other malicious activity forms.
The Differences Between IT Security, Cybersecurity, and Information Security
IT Security
This relates to the security of your company’s data via computer network security. Attached is a concept called Information Assurance, which refers to CIA. CIA relates to confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
Confidentiality is about protecting sensitive and private information from unauthorized access. Integrity relates to protecting data from deletion or modification for unauthorized persons. Availability refers to the actual availability of company data.
Information Security
Information security relates to the different tools and processes your company uses specifically to protect any critical or sensitive business information.
Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity deals explicitly with protecting your business’s sensitive and critical data from cybercriminals. Although their malicious attempts usually occur over the internet, these attacks can also happen face-to-face.
Many companies believe that because they aren’t some large tech company or a severe government organization they’re unlikely targets of a cyberattack. In reality, the potential cyber threats to your company are real and prevalent. Just because you’re petite or don’t produce something you consider “high-value” doesn’t mean you’re safe.
Keep in mind that many cyberattacks, like phishing and malware, aren’t necessarily targeted. Instead, hackers send out mass emails or infect websites, knowing someone, somewhere will click the wrong link and infect their computer. We’ll go into greater detail on this point later in this article. Businesses that store large amounts of sensitive data would do well to ensure they follow best practices, as security breaches could result in highly costly business losses and legal penalties.
But even if such an outcome were not the case, to ignore the possibility of malicious attacks is to ignore the risk of your day-to-day operations abruptly shutting down for an unknown period of time. There’s also a risk that your internal and external business communications might be disrupted if your cloud applications’ security, or even your social media accounts, are compromised. Such breaches, especially those that divulge your users’ private information, could lead to significant reputational damage, loss of data, and an inevitable hit to your bottom line.
Maintaining Your Business’s IT Security
With everything that needs to be done, from the security audits to policy implementation, it can feel like one too many things to deal with on top of standard business operations.
Spend less time worrying about your security and more time running your business by taking advantage of our Managed Security Services, which come with preventative IT Security measures on top of our advanced threat detection and remediation solutions.