Prepare Your IT Infrastructure for Compliance
Anyone considering entering a network security role must understand the importance of preparing the IT infrastructure for compliance.
In addition to enhancing onsite data security, it’s fundamental to avoiding legal consequences and penalties, improving operations, and retaining customer trust.
Various compliance standards, including GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and SOC2, require companies to follow strict security practices.
If a business fails to do so, it could receive a huge fine, a pause in operations, a loss of license for non-compliance, and significant reputational damage.
For this reason, you must strengthen online defences and eliminate vulnerabilities. Get started by learning how to prepare your IT infrastructure for compliance.
Table of Contents
Understand Your Requirements
To remain compliant, you must gain an in-depth understanding of your industry’s compliance requirements.
Your company may need to introduce essential tools and resources to adhere to its contractual and regulatory obligations.
For instance, all healthcare organizations must adhere to strict HIPAA requirements, manufacturers need to comply with NIST 800-171, and finance organizations must follow PCI-DSS.
Once you understand your legal duties, you can introduce the appropriate IT solutions and policies into your operations.
Introduce Managed IT Support
More companies across various industries are investing in managed IT support services to adhere to the latest data compliance.
Instead of hiring an expensive team of in-house IT professionals, you can turn to experienced IT companies Ottawa to adhere to various compliance requirements.
It provides continuous peace of mind, as it monitors systems day and night, identifying potential issues before they arise, and ensuring data compliance.
For instance, it includes a managed firewall and cybersecurity protection, network and server monitoring, cloud migration and management, backup and disaster recovery, and more.
Improve Data Accountability
Ignorance isn’t an excuse for failing to adhere to strict compliance regulations. Companies of all sizes are expected to take the steps to adhere to the law and may receive a major fine if they fail to comply.
Prevent legal and financial consequences by hiring a Data Protection Officer (DPO) or assigning an employee as a Compliance Lead to increase accountability.
Encrypt Moving Data
Various compliance standards require all companies to encrypt all data moving across the network. Prevent repercussions by replacing insecure protocols with HTTPS, SSH, or SFTP.
Also, it’s recommended to verify that all remote access and site-to-site VPNs feature strong encryption.
Create Clear and Strict Policies
Every company that wants to remain legally compliant must introduce strict IT policies, which provide detailed information about internal requirements.
For instance, the formal documents should include information on:
- Acceptable use
- Data retention
- Incident response
The policy must also match your company’s workforce. For instance, you might need to create separate policies for a largely remote workforce and a small internal team.
It’s also vital to routinely review the policies and update them when necessary to ensure your team follows best practices.
Reporting should also be incorporated into every policy, as it’s essential that all employees understand how to report suspicious online activity and the consequences of ignoring it.
Invest in Disaster Recovery
There is a reason disaster recovery is one of many elements in a managed IT service, as it’s fundamental to compliance and prevents business downtime following a disaster.
Unfortunately, many companies overlook disaster recovery plans, making it harder to bounce back following a cyberattack, malicious internal attack, or natural disaster.
For this reason, your team must identify critical IT assets to determine potential risks and introduce the appropriate data backup solutions.
It’s also crucial to routinely test a disaster recovery plan to ensure your company can quickly bounce back should the worst happen.
Segment Your Network
Depending on your business, it might be beneficial to segment your network to create isolated zones.
For instance, many IT experts would recommend separating your guest Wi-Fi from your company’s server to contain a breach to one area, keeping cybercriminals at bay.
Network segmentation also makes it easy to introduce the Principle of Least Privilege, as you can determine who has access to specific servers.
For instance, only the HR department can access an HR application server, which stores payroll data and personal employee information.
You’ll rest easy knowing a hacker cannot easily move across your network, making it harder for them to gain access to your company’s sensitive data, accounts, and domain.
