How to Prepare Your Customers for National Cybersecurity Awareness Month

While MSPs do not need a reminder to practice good cybersecurity habits, we cannot always say the same for end users. That being said, National Cybersecurity Awareness Month is a great opportunity to ensure your customers are up-to-date on the latest best practices with a cybersecurity training program.

The nature of your business will dictate the specific cybersecurity training schedule you choose. However, a good start is to ensure new employees receive training as part of onboarding and all employees receive training on a regular basis. It’s important to have a formalized plan in place to keep security front of mind and keep employees informed about new threats.

Unfortunately, there’s no single product that will solve all of your cybersecurity problems. In today’s world, it takes many technologies and processes to provide comprehensive risk and security management. Total data protection requires a multi-pronged approach:

● Backup and Disaster Recovery: When it comes to protecting against destructive cyber attacks, backing up your data regularly allows you to restore systems and data to a trusted point before the breach occurred without losing data created since the previous night’s backup.

● Antivirus Software: This software is designed to detect, block, and remove viruses and malware. Modern antivirus software can protect against ransomware, keyloggers, backdoors, rootkits, trojan horses, worms, adware and spyware. Some advanced products are designed to detect other threats, such as malicious URLs, phishing attacks, social engineering techniques, identity theft and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

● Firewalls: Firewalls are designed to monitor incoming and outgoing network traffic based on a set of configurable rules—separating your secure internal network from the Internet, which is not considered secure. Firewalls are typically deployed as an appliance on your network and in many cases offer additional functionality, such as a virtual private network (VPN) for remote workers.

● Patch Management: Patch management is an important consideration as well. Cyber criminals design their attacks around vulnerabilities in popular software products such as Microsoft Office or Adobe Flash Player. As vulnerabilities are exploited, software vendors issue updates to address them. As such, using outdated versions of software products can expose your business to security risks.

● Password Management: According to Verizon’s 2017 Data Breach Investigations Report, weak passwords were at the heart of 81% of data breaches. To mitigate this risk, businesses should adopt password management solutions for all employees. Many people have a document that contains all of their password information in one easily accessible file—this is unsafe and unnecessary. There are many password management apps available today. These tools allow users keep track of all your passwords, and if any of your accounts are compromised, you can change all of your passwords quickly.

If you’re interested in more tips and templates for total data protection, we’ve got you covered. In our Cybersecurity Made MSPeasy Toolkit, we’ve bundled some of our most popular resources at Datto. This toolkit includes resources to educate your clients as well as a few resources featuring the latest stats and ransomware trends to keep you on the forefront of cybersecurity.

Ryan Weeks is Chief Information Security Officer at Datto.

Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.