5 Cybersecurity Tasks Any Business Can Automate
As a business owner, you’re probably always looking for new and innovative ways to save time and money. You may not think of cybersecurity as one of those areas, but it can be. In fact, there are many cybersecurity tasks that you can automate to help keep your business protected while you focus on other things. Below are 5 cyber security tasks any business can automate.
- Automate your system updates
Lastly, you can do a lot for your cybersecurity by automating your system updates, including automatically installing patches and fixes. When you are in charge of a network with only one or two servers, updating them manually is not too hard.
However, when you are running a large infrastructure that has hundreds or even thousands of machines to update at the same time, it becomes next to impossible without automation. A few administrators have gotten into bad habits by keeping their system up to date, but it’s time to break those habits for good.
Why? It is impossible for humans to keep up with all the security updates that are released every day on a Windows server. Without automation, you will miss many critical system patches that can leave your company open to data breaches.
- Automate your malware and antivirus protection
Businesses can improve their cybersecurity by automating their malware and antivirus protection. The steps you can take to automate these processes include :
1) Investing in an effective antivirus that can be automated.
2) Investing in a malware-blocking solution that is compatible with your antivirus software.
3) Setting up dynamic rules within your malware subscription, which will automatically block threats when they attempt to download to the computer. These rules are customized based on the file name, size and hash, as well as IP address.
4) Integrating your malware antivirus into your company’s Active Directory domain through an agent or extension which allows you to automatically install the software onto any computer joined to the domain.
5) Enabling protection on computers by setting scheduled scans and automatic updates of the antivirus and malware definitions.
6) Setting up a backup schedule for your antivirus, which will revert your computer back to a clean slate in the event that the current antivirus fails.
- Automate your email spam filtering
Automating your email spam filtering is another good way to improve cybersecurity because it helps balance the time between investigating spam emails and developing new rulesets. The former is a diminishing rate, whereas the latter has an increasing return on investment.
You can, for example, set up a Python script that automatically filters your inbox using a whitelist/blacklist method. The first step is to create a whitelist/blacklist database containing the emails you know are spam and those you want to receive without any filters or processing. The idea is that all emails not in this database are then considered spam.
- Automate your data backups
It is crucial that you are automating your data backups as a business. Whether you are backing up small datasets or large data centres, it needs to be automated and continuous to ensure that your retention policies are being met. Automating your backups will also allow the entire process to run smoothly without any chance of human error due to manual interaction with the system.
- Automate your password management
One of the easiest things a business can do to automate their cybersecurity is to automate their password management. This involves taking a proactive and automated approach to password generation and deployment.
Automating passwords is the only way that we will ever be able to maintain strong, complex passwords for all of our accounts – both personal and work – without having to remember dozens (or hundreds) of them. Password management also falls into the “low hanging fruit” category as it’s among the easiest of the IT security measures we can implement.
Passwords are inherently insecure, and they’re also becoming less and less effective as a means of authentication, especially in large enterprise environments. Businesses need to start thinking about transitioning away from passwords and looking into alternatives such as Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) instead.
Conclusion
There are plenty of easy automation procedures you can implement today that will improve your cybersecurity. It is important to take advantage of automation here because a system attack can be a career-changing event. Who wants to talk about all the time they spent fighting an attack that never should have happened? Automate as much as you can. The more repetitive work you do, the better your chance of being prepared for an unexpected cybersecurity issue.
