The NIST Recommends This 5-Stage Cybersecurity Framework

If there’s one thing that helps businesses establish consistent policies and strategy, it’s a good framework. You can use a framework for anything, including network security. Today, we want to walk you through the cybersecurity protection standards as they are outlined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology so you can better protect your business.

The NIST framework has five parts: identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover.

Identify Threats

You can’t protect against a threat you don’t understand, period.

Businesses must first identify threats and how they might strike against various assets and resources. For example, you need to understand the hardware and software that keeps your business running, as well as how the supply chain impacts acquiring these resources. Furthermore, your business needs to adhere to regulatory guidelines, and you must take steps to ensure that your supply chain is not interrupted by potential threats.

It might not seem useful to know in the context of cybersecurity, but knowing what you need to protect, as well as what you are protecting against, helps you determine risk and the appropriate steps forward.

Protect Against Threats

Now that you know what your cybersecurity situation demands, you can implement the following preventative solutions:

• Access controls help minimize the risk of unauthorized access to your data and infrastructure.
• Similarly, data security helps keep critical information available to those needing it while maintaining its confidentiality otherwise.
• Establishing regular and proactive maintenance practices to ensure all updates are in place and devices experience optimal uptime.
• Training staff as appropriate based on their level of permission.

We’ll add our two cents to the conversation by recommending something not on the radar of the NIST—business continuity—as it’s important to know your business' bare minimum operating standards.

Detect Threats

It’s not a question of if you get targeted by cyberattacks, but when.

While you can protect your business as much as you want, sooner or later, you’re going to have to be ready to handle an attack aimed right at your business. The solutions you implement should be able to send you warning signs and alerts so you can take action in the moment. Furthermore, these alerts help you ensure that your solutions are actually working as they should be.

If you don’t detect threats as they target your business, you’re asking for trouble.

Respond to Threats

The goal of cybersecurity is to catch, detect, and respond to threats so they have a minimal impact on your operations.

Naturally, this is a high-stress event, so you want to have an iron-clad policy to turn to just for situations like these. Not only do you need to mitigate the issue in question, but you also need to be ready to respond to the many other residual threats and the problems they might invite. Throughout the entire process, you’ll want to remain in touch with anyone who might be impacted, such as customers, vendors, or employees, as well as your local law enforcement.

Following an attack, you’ll want to take a look at your network and collect as much information on the attack as possible, as arming yourself with this knowledge can help you better protect it in the future.

Recover from Threats

The challenge continues long after you’ve eliminated threats as you work to recover from the incident.

For one, you need to get your interrupted services back in operating order with the help of a business continuity plan. You’ll want to have clear, actionable steps in place that you can follow to get your company back on track following a cybersecurity incident. Be intentional about using this backup strategy to recover your critical systems, then improve them so that another issue doesn’t occur later down the line.

Keep your stakeholders informed of the recovery process, too, as your customers, staff, and other partners will want to know how it’s going.

Take Your Security Seriously

Five steps might seem like a lot, but this should serve to showcase just how important this is to your business’ longevity.

Rather than react to a cybersecurity crisis, you should have solid strategies and systems in place beforehand. This will help to ensure you’re not caught unawares. Keep in mind that you have trusted IT resources at Network Integration Specialists, Inc. whom you can rely on for any and all security needs.

To learn more, call us today at (804) 264-9339.