By converging physical and cyber security, organizations gain deeper business insights and better protection against sophisticated threats. The practice of segmenting security teams into distinct physical security and cybersecurity groups has been the norm since the early days of IT. Within the last decade, however, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, advances in cloud technologies and the digital transformation trend have led to a greater awareness between the cyber world and real world.

CIS Controls v8 is here, and there are some significant changes organizations should pay attention to. We spend a lot of time in our blogs talking about—and recommending—cybersecurity frameworks. The reason for this is pretty straightforward: there are a lot of decisions that go into cybersecurity planning, and failing to use a framework makes the process exponentially more complicated.

Zero-trust is the logical successor to the legacy perimeter security model, but there are many common pitfalls to consider. Whether companies know it or not, we’re all on a journey toward zero-trust security. This concept, which can be summarized as “never trust; always verify,” has been around for over a decade as a security focus on least privilege. However, the pandemic brought it to the forefront, as corporate offices emptied and millions of workers started working from home. So, in a relatively short period, tens of thousands of companies inadvertently accelerated their zero-trust journey, often without a well-thought-out plan.

The truth is that you’re going to pay for cybersecurity one way or another. So, it’s better to invest now while the cost is much lower and more predictable. As a business owner, you have lots of projects vying for your time and money, and let’s face it, anything that’s not a revenue driver is easy to push to the bottom of the list. Unfortunately, cybersecurity too often falls into this category. Companies may tell themselves, “We already have security in place. We have a firewall; we have antivirus software; our critical applications are password-protected.” The reality is that you’re probably well aware that cyberattacks have exploded in the past 18 months, both in terms of frequency and seriousness. This year, for example, the damage costs from cybercrime are expected to reach $6 trillion, up from $3 trillion in 2015. To put this number in perspective, if it were measured as a country, cybercrime would be the world’s third-largest economy after the U.S. and China. In the past, data breaches were about data loss and the potential harm to the victim’s reputation. Today, however, we see attacks that result in significant operational delays and setbacks.

If the term endpoint security still evokes images of signature-based antivirus software, it’s time for a refresher on how critical this technology is to your organization. Time seemed to speed up over the past 18 months, with so many changes taking place in such a short period. For example, within the business world, digital transformation initiatives accelerated by seven years, according to a survey from McKinsey & Company. Besides the massive shift to remote work and new collaboration technologies, many companies had to update their security strategies.

While there’s no silver bullet to preventing a ransomware incident, following security experts’ recommendations will greatly reduce your vulnerability. Thousands of Americans experienced the trickle-down effect of a ransomware breach in early May following the Colonial Pipeline attack, which shut down the oil supplier’s operations and left many scrambling to find gas and waiting in huge lines when they did. The attack originated from DarkSide, a Russian-linked criminal group, who threatened to leak the utility provider’s sensitive data unless the company paid a $4.4 million ransom.

How you respond to a security incident can determine whether the problem gets fanned into flame or extinguished. When companies plan their cybersecurity strategies, there’s often a lot of time spent talking about and testing various security solutions, backup and disaster recovery tools and security awareness training options. All these actions are vital components to building a strong security posture, but they’re not the first thing companies should be thinking about. One of the most important foundational activities organizations tend to put off until it’s too late (i.e., post-incident) is creating a plan that details how your company would handle a security incident. While it might sound a bit defeatist to create a plan that assumes the security tools and services you’re about to invest in to prevent a security incident are going to fail, it’s not the case. First, not every security incident is a worst-case scenario like the Colonial Pipeline attack that resulted in a $5 million ransom payment. Often, an incident is something much smaller, such as a failed attempt to breach your defenses. The second point is that a small security incident can become a serious threat if the incident response isn’t handled properly. More on this point below.