Prevention is worth a pound of cure, but when a security breach is inevitable, preparation is just as valuable. A thorough assessment guides your deployment of data protection tools and sets up you up for an effective response that mitigates any impact to your business.

Threat actors are now trying to break down your proverbial door on a regular basis – an attempted security breach is not no longer an unusual, occasional occurrence. Rather than solely focusing on preventing a breach completely, your security strategy should also look at how you can minimize the impact of an incident quickly and effectively.

If you want to bolster your security and build resilience against today’s bad actors, you need a three-pronged approach that assesses, protects, and responds.

Assess your strengths and weaknesses

If you want to thwart any attack you must start where you are. With the help of a managed services provider, you should scan your network, conduct penetration testing, and establish clear IT policies. These essential steps will help you form the foundation of your security strategy so you can protect data and respond to the inevitable attack.

Protect your critical assets

Your assessment will help you prioritize what data needs to be protected – not everything you store is mission critical – and allow you to strike a balance between protection and productivity to ward against viruses, malware, ransomware, insider threats and human error.

Protecting your sensitive data from threat actors who want to sell it or cripple your business operations requires cloud-based Next-Generation Antivirus technology that combines behavioral detection, artificial intelligence, and machine learning algorithms to anticipate and prevents threats. Your firewall provides an essential layer of protection for your network and your endpoints.

Your data protection strategy also provides redundancy – because it’s not a matter of if you but when you experience a data breach or disruption to your operations. Having redundancy, including cloud backups, enables you to quickly restore mission critical data and applications in the event of any incident.

Automate, respond, and mitigate

Your security team can’t keep up with every alert – you need to automate your security if you are to proactively protect your network infrastructure across every endpoint.

Technology such as extended detection and response (XDR) collects threat data from your data protection to provide you with actionable, enriched threat intelligence to help your security teams prioritize, hunt, and eliminate threats quickly and efficiently. A vulnerability management platform, meanwhile, provides complete visibility and automatically discovers your assets as they come online.

Your security response to constant attacks by bad actors is made possible by your initial assessment and the data protection tools you put in place – they set you to effectively respond to any attack, quickly and decisively.