The pillars of security strategy are privacy and data protection. They must be maintained to ensure that your business can focus on what matters most – growing revenue, expanding customer base or simply staying in operation without fear for the future because you took all necessary precautions from day one!

A security strategy is a collection of policies, procedures and practices that are put in place to protect your company’s information. The four main pillars include data protection, identity management (making sure you know who can access what), vulnerability assessments or penetration testing for identifying potential risks before they become problems, and access control.

Let’s have a look at each of these four in more detail below:

1) Data Protection

Nowadays, data is one of the most vital assets in any company. A single breach can cost you dearly, so it is important to ensure that all precautions are met to avoid this type of situation.  Data protection represents your business’ ability to protect valuable information from loss or misuse. This includes hard copy documents as well as files stored on networks or databases.   Making sure that valuable data remains intact under almost all circumstances requires putting safeguards in places such as encryption, firewalls, anti-virus software, document shredding services and many more.

2) Identity Management

A strong management of user identities is an important part of any strategy to protect sensitive data.  It is critical that your business properly identifies users and then maintains control over their access rights (or privileges) by means of multi-factor authentication.  Multi-factor authentication involves more than one factor to gain access to a system or network, e.g., knowledge (what), possession (who) and inherence (where). This adds an extra layer of security which makes them harder for hackers to breach.

3) Patch Management

Patch management is another interesting addition to the list, because it’s something we usually forget about. Well, you know what they say: “Out of sight out of mind”. In our hypothetical case, however, patch management can save the day.  It helps you identify vulnerabilities in your system, by applying software updates and changing configurations. These are usually addressed by upgrading to a later version of the product or fixing bugs so they become less vulnerable to cyber-attacks.

5) Network Segmentation

Network segmentation is also important for IT security. This means that all data within an organization is logically separated into different segments, each containing its own set of users, applications and systems. Keeping them separated can prevent loss of information or incidents where different components have been breached.

6) Control Physical & Logical Access Control & Authorizations

Control physical access to hardware, as well as logical access through authorizations. By controlling access at both levels, you make it harder for malicious actors to bypass your security measures and attack deeper into your system or network.

7) Secure All Endpoints

Secure all end-user devices, such as laptops, cell phones and tablets. This is especially important for mobile technologies such as smartphones and laptops because you cannot control them like stationary computers. For example, malware on a smartphone can transmit confidential data directly out of your network.