In the last year, 43% of UK businesses have been hit by a cyber attack. Little wonder that the British cyber security market is growing by more than 6% a year.
But is a lot of the money spent on sophisticated cyber security tools being wasted? If companies aren’t building their security on solid IT best practices, it could be.
What are the IT best practices vital to your cyber security posture? And why are managed IT service companies best placed to provide such advice?
Table of contents
- The IT foundations for cyber security success
- Why managed IT services are the cyber security enabler
- Managed IT services and Cyber Essentials
- Looking to strengthen your cyber security?
The IT foundations for cyber security success
As a security-first MSP, we have had many companies come to us asking for high-level cyber security services such as penetration testing. However, after a discovery with their leadership team, we found that such advanced cyber security services are often not the best answers aligned with their business needs and goals.
In most instances, they are not far enough along the IT maturity scale to justify this investment. Often, we discover that cost-effective best practice IT policies have not yet been deployed in the organisation. Instead of jumping straight into complex, high-end cyber security services, there are more effective basic steps they could take that are far better suited to their current needs.
In fact, these foundational measures are not only necessary for businesses, but they’re critical to maintaining secure operations and ensuring business continuity. Once a business has the right IT policies, guided by best practice, that is enough to address the issues it’s been experiencing.
In our experience, the most neglected and perhaps the weakest link in the security chain is empowering the people within the organisation with cyber security awareness. With the right training, your team can not only avoid falling victim to security vulnerabilities, but they can also prevent them from occurring. With that being said, cyber security awareness training is perhaps the most effective single thing an organisation can do to improve its security posture.
One of the most effective ways to achieve best practices across the business is to go through the process of gaining the Cyber Essentials certification. Backed by the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), Cyber Essentials is specifically designed for small businesses and non-profits. The process of certification brings the applicant’s cyber security up to best practice in five areas:
- Secure configuration: ensure your network, computers and other devices are set up in a way that minimises security risks.
- User access control: ensure that users can only access the devices, resources and configuration options required for their job.
- Malware protection: ensure that every endpoint, platform and virtual machine is secured with the right level of anti-virus protection.
- Security update management: ensure devices and systems are up to date with patches and security updates.
- Firewall management: configure firewalls to segment, secure and manage networks to keep cyber criminals at bay.
Many businesses, even those following best practices in some areas, have not ensured that their entire IT environment is run according to best practices.
For instance, a third of UK businesses don’t have active patch management, and 48% don’t have proper user monitoring. Fixing these does not require advanced tools or upfront investments, but would prevent many attacks from happening.
Similarly, the most common attack vector for cyber criminals is phishing. There are advanced, and often very useful, anti-phishing tools. However, before investing in these, businesses can achieve a great deal with employee training and password policies.
Once an organisation has hardened its security using the tools it has, then it becomes worthwhile and cost-effective to ask what other more advanced security tools it might benefit from having in its armoury.
Why managed IT services are the cyber security enabler
Managed service providers (MSPs) work closely with a company to gain a complete understanding of its business goals, its operational environment and the technology stack it uses. Because of this, MSPs are well placed to understand and align the company’s IT goals, its security needs and the tools it uses to achieve those needs.
An MSP can help your organisation achieve a layered defence in depth, with maximum cost-effectiveness and without wasting money on unnecessary tools or the duplication of resources.
With outsourced IT support services, you can get instant access to market-leading IT and cyber security professionals and tools. And you avoid upfront costs, training and recruitment.
A managed IT services provider can help you:
- Ensure that all the basics of cyber security are covered (patching, endpoint protection, permission-based access and so on).
- Audit and understand the organisation’s business, IT and cyber security needs and goals, for the present and the future.
- Build best practices, permission-based security and a suite of IT tools and technologies that match the needs identified in step 2.
A provider of managed IT services will lay a solid foundation of IT best practices. They will be able to integrate this into your daily workflows, your business IT estate, and more. This eliminates many of the potential cyber security risks your business might face before those risks develop into threats.
When threats do develop, having IT infrastructure that’s robust and responsive makes those threats easier to detect, understand, and defend against.
Managed IT services and Cyber Essentials
When choosing an outsourced IT support provider, it makes sense to look for one that specialises in Cyber Essentials. A Cyber Essentials specialist will be able to help you achieve your IT and security goals faster.
This will quickly move you up the IT maturity scale, building best practices into the way you operate. This includes implementing things such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework.
ITIL is a framework that helps organisations align IT operations with business needs. It provides structured guidance for service-lifecycle stages, including strategy, design, transition, operation, and continual improvement. Widely adopted across industries, ITIL enhances service quality, efficiency, and customer satisfaction.
With the right approach, the work an organisation puts into achieving Cyber Essentials certification can simultaneously be used to embed ITIL and other standards for best practice into the organisation’s IT operations.
A single investment in Cyber Essentials hardens the organisation’s security, demonstrates best practices to investors and customers, and potentially opens access to procurement rosters open only to businesses with the Cyber Essentials certification.
Looking to strengthen your cyber security?
Texaport is one of the UK’s leading managed IT services providers. We also have almost two decades of experience helping businesses like yours harden their security and qualify for Cyber Essentials.
Our experts will lay a solid foundation for your cyber security and get the most from your existing assets before spending money on expensive cyber security platforms.
Contact us today to find out how our experts can help you get the best possible balance of security and return on investment on IT.
