As Internet diffuses, the world will continue to transition markets and businesses into the cyberspace from the meatspace. Consequently, individuals, firms and nations will do more transactions online. Online business and communication offer speed, efficiency and cost reduction.

Nonetheless, as cyber culture increases, governments, firms and individuals will be faced by digital terror, digital fraud, and intellectual property thefts, among others. The solution is not to decouple from the cyber community; rather, to develop a holistic strategy that will mitigate these threats.

During my days as a bank IT infrastructure administrator with certification in Cisco technologies, I noted some points on what firms and individuals can do to protect themselves. The following are updated suggestions on how to stay secure in a digitalizing world for the trio of governments, individuals and firms. certificate iv in cyber security

Establish IT Security Policy

Many organizations do not have IT security policy. That creates vulnerabilities for them. Irrespective of your size, you must have a policy that ensures that your firm’s digital asset is well secured and protected with steps defined on how those will be done. Understand that your cyber threats are not just from the computers, those Smartphones are internet nodes and could destroy your firm’s competitiveness. As staff accesses more office data via these phones, you must have a policy to ensure that you have your data secured. There are many Wi-fi enabled devices today; those are potential threats if they can compromise your data. Even a GPS location system could harm your strategy if it can reveal where your marketing directors are going to the whole world. You must specify how those marketing team use those solutions.

Train Your Staff

While you can have an IT Security Policy, that is not enough. Every firm must make sure that staff understands this policy and what they must do to keep the digital ware safe and secured. Do not assume anything. And this training must be constant as the digital threats evolve, you must update the knowledge of your staff

Make Your Staff Partners

This is perhaps the most important for financial institution. The most threats come from the staff or what they call internal customers. While you can have policies and tell them what they do, you must ensure that you have ethical and honest work teams that are dependable. It turns out that many IT security issues in financial institutions happen due to mistakes or involvements of staff.

Under Industrial Espionage

Assume that in this ultra competitive world that your firm may be under attack. Understanding this means you must develop ways to curtail it. You must protect your trade secrets; otherwise your survivability can be compromised. Think through the ways you package your technology and how you relate with your customers if there are potential threats to trade secret. Also, assume that some other firms in other nations may want to steal from you. Be vigilant.

Get Data off the Web

In the most critical instances, the most secured data are those which are not online. You can disconnect your very important servers online or dynamically in sequence change their network addresses. It is not all machines that have to be online. As a young graduate, I told a former university chancellor who was opening a tax business that one machine must be offline since he could not guarantee that it cannot be hacked. In the same way, build a network where you create a cushion between your most critical server and the web. In other words, have a redundant server between your critical data and the web so that any attach will first hit that redundant one.