Invest In Your Business Cyber Security For 2025: 4 Solutions You Can Put In Place Today
As businesses of all levels undergo profound digital transformations, the cyber security landscape has significantly expanded, with criminals now using increasingly sophisticated attacks to steal sensitive data. This exposes your business, your employees, and your customers to a growing range of digital security threats. However, many of these risks can be counteracted by improvements in anti-malware and firewall software, which are affordably priced and can be implemented without disruption to your current systems.
1. Next Generation Firewall (NGFW)
So-called ‘next-generation’ firewalls are modern proactive applications that go beyond the inspection properties of traditional firewalls. Standard firewalls work by monitoring and controlling incoming and outgoing network traffic based on predetermined security rules. They will normally inspect ‘packets’ of data as they attempt to pass through the firewall, checking the source and destination IP address, port numbers and protocols against a set of rules to determine whether the packet should be allowed or blocked. Other applications use ‘stateful inspection’, in which they track the state of active connections and make decisions based on the context of the traffic.
NGFW firewalls go beyond these features by including intrusion prevention systems that use anomaly detection to identify potential threats and suspicious behaviour. Many also come with better application awareness software and control systems, as well as better threat intelligence sources to address a wider range of modern cyber security risks. Many modern firewalls use deep packet inspection (DPI), for example, in which the entire data packet is assessed, and not just the header information – allowing them to block malware and ransomware hidden within the data load.
2. Anti-Malware Software
Modern anti-malware software uses a multilayered approach to protect your devices and systems against a broad range of threats. At the heart of these systems, real-time scanning algorithms continuously monitor data flows and system activities, swiftly detecting and neutralising malicious software before it can damage your data. This proactive approach to defence is complemented by detailed behavioural analysis, which monitors your applications and processes to recognise the markers indicative of malware, even if it lacks a known signature. (Compare this to off-the-shelf antivirus software, which simply scans your files and devices for known malware signatures.
3. Email Antispam Service
Email cyber security threats are as old as emails themselves, and evolve in sophistication and effectiveness each year. Unfortunately, as email threats are often written off as being easy to spot, many businesses’ cyber security systems are inadequately prepared to detect and avoid inbound threats coming through the inbox. Modern email antispam systems address this lack by analysing patterns and behaviours of emails to distinguish between legitimate messages and unwanted spam. These algorithms continually learn and adapt to improve their accuracy in detecting spam with each iteration. The accuracy of this process is further enhanced by reputation-based filtering, in which the application evaluates each email sender’s history and reliability, allowing the system to block traffic from known spammers and malicious sources more efficiently.
4. Configure Devices with Correct User Privileges
Cybercriminals are experts at exploiting cracks in business defences, and some of the main gateways they use to access your data are poorly configured devices and applications that aren’t set up with the correct user privileges. By setting the appropriate user permissions for all devices and applications, you close down back door access to unauthorised individuals – while ensuring that sensitive information and critical system functions are accessible by people who ‘need to know’. Modern cyber security works on the principle of least privilege, which gives users only the permissions necessary to perform their tasks, minimising potential vulnerabilities. Privileges can always be increased as requirements change.
What Next?
To strengthen your cyber security and reduce your risk level in 2025, please get in touch with Vantage IT today to discuss our range of cost-effective managed IT services.
