Cybercrime threatens to drown modern business.
That’s no exaggeration. Cybercrime costs $600 billion per year on a global scale. It can rock everything from a national election to a local business. The cybercrime tide threatens to wash away companies that fail to shore up their defenses.
That’s why we’ve put together this survival list of 10 key security skills your IT team will benefit from.
Knowledge of Tools
Let’s start with the obvious: an IT team can’t be much use if they don’t understand the security tools available to them.
Unfortunately for your team, cybersecurity evolves almost daily. It’s one of the best examples of an arms race outside geopolitics. As tools evolve, so do criminal methods—and vice versa on a loop.
That means your team can’t get by on static knowledge. They need frequent training to stay up to date. That’s training you’ll need to provide or subsidise.
The cost of keeping your IT team up to date can be a significant one. But it’s an investment in your company’s future. Without training, you risk exposing your business to much larger costs down the line. A cybersecurity incident could even lead to the complete collapse of your business.
Cloud Security
Trends indicate that cloud security is the future of business IT. It’s easy to see the appeal: flexible working, scalability, and automated backups.
Yet the cloud brings with it a raft of cybersecurity issues. There are more threats to your data security than cybercrime. The cloud exaggerates existing data hygiene problems common to businesses.
To combat these, your team needs to know how the cloud changes the way we handle data. There are a wide variety of security habits and procedures that need to be in place for secure cloud computing. Your employees will need to understand the wide range of cloud technologies available and how they relate back to your cybersecurity.
Secure Development
A business needs to lock its doors tight against cybercrime. But it’s too easy to roll out the welcome mat instead with bad development security.
Incident prevention begins with secure development. Your team needs to think about security at every stage of the design process. That includes everything from individual awareness to the design and implementation of software.
Your project manager will need to play a key role to ensure secure development. But it’s also the responsibility of many individual members of the team. Your coders, testers, and policy writers all need to understand how security concerns affect the development process.
Psychology of Cybersecurity
An IT team needs to borrow a skill from children in the schoolyard: switching between the role of cop and robber.
To thwart cybercrime, cybersecurity experts need to think like the criminals. You can’t expect every member of your IT team to have a psychology degree, but basic training on criminal psychology wouldn’t go amiss.
They’ll also need to understand the common tools and methods used by cybercriminals. That way, they can anticipate threats before they emerge.
This will also involve staying up to date on news to find out about new techniques or major security vulnerabilities.
Much like traditional security, understanding the minds behind the crimes will create a roadmap to better defenses.
Criminals aren’t the only threat, either. Knowing the common pitfalls of data handling and security on an individual basis will allow your team to predict where internal breaches are likely to occur.
Project Management
Cybersecurity has evolved from the basic considerations of online safety to a front in a digital war. Security projects have grown to match.
Project management now plays a key role in cybersecurity as a result. It’ll be on your team to develop and deploy large-scale projects to improve your defenses and turn cybersecurity skills into a company-wide culture.
You won’t need an entire team of project managers to make that happen. One or two people with project management experience should be enough to steer the ship.
A project manager will help ensure your cybersecurity remains everyone’s responsibility. They’ll also ensure that communication happens between different teams, porting across information that could prove vital to your overall security.
Policy Development
Policies and procedures form the bedrock of cybersecurity. Policies aren’t just preventative, they also allow employees to respond quickly to incidents.
Writing policy isn’t as easy as it looks. Strong procedures are simple to understand but need to be comprehensive, too. Your staff needs to know how to act in all cybersecurity situations, from preventative action up to crisis response.
Your team will also need to communicate and enforce policy. This set of soft skills isn’t always native to an IT team, who may have more technical competencies.
In some cases, your IT team will also need to work with other organisations to ensure the policies from all involved parties are respected. That demands the ability to work with other teams and “translate” the relevant policies between different company cultures.
Testing and Auditing
There’s no telling quite how strong a system is until someone attempts to knock it down. With rigorous testing, you can be the first to try—and, with some luck, the last to succeed.
Your team will need a diverse set of skills for security testing and auditing. Vulnerability scans can flag up the major weaknesses in a system. It’ll take a prepared team to act on them and discover vulnerabilities that aren’t obvious to an automated system.
Regular audits will ensure that your team discovers and resolves vulnerabilities before they become known to bad actors. Software security tends to degrade over time. Obsolete code and lax procedures will both dent your security. Auditing is the wrench you’ll use to tighten it back up.
Automation
Many cyber attacks aren’t the work of individuals, but an army of faceless robots. Yet a modern IT team can use similar machine automation to protect their networks.
Automated security systems can detect and act on threats before human workers ever become aware of the risk. That means faster response times along with leaving human workers free to focus on more complex tasks requiring ingenuity and imagination.
To make the maximum use possible of automation, your team needs to understand what’s out there and how it can help them.
Crisis Response
No cybersecurity is invincible. Strong IT security is about risk management, not incident-proofing. That’s why a team with strong crisis response skills is as important as technical know-how.
Running in circles and screaming might be cathartic but it’s not going to resolve a cybersecurity crisis. For that, you need robust procedures and quick deployment of incident resolution systems.
Robust procedures are no less essential for representing the softer side of incident response. Crisis response procedures allow staff to act with speed and authority to a cybersecurity threat. Time will be of the essence, so a well-crafted policy greases the wheels of the response.
Your incident resolution systems will bring the cybersecurity threat under control. The faster they do this, the more you can minimise damage to your company in the form of data losses, reputation damage, and later punitive actions.
Crisis response often requires a joined up approach. Your IT team needs to work with other departments, such as your PR team, to manage an incident.
Forensics and Analysis
We’ve established that nothing can prevent a cybersecurity incident with complete confidence. Crisis response will soften the blow, but your team will need to go CSI with it if they want to stop it happening again.
That’s where forensic skills and “post-game” analysis come in.
Forensic work will turn up the tangibles of the incident. What happened, where, what was the impact — the meat and bones of what happened. This will give your team the info they’ll need to shore up the defenses to prevent it from happening again. They’ll need to blend old-fashioned investigative skills with computer forensics to get it done.
This is also the time to take a look at the response. Did the policies survive a trial by fire? Was there miscommunication and chaos? This might also be the time to establish fault if there was any non-compliance with established policy. You might even trace fault to a training deficit rather than a conduct issue.
If you want to prevent your company from becoming a cybercriminal’s pinata. Once it’s out there that your systems are vulnerable, you’ll need to work quickly to protect your future.
Security Skills to Lock It Up Tight
When it comes to computer security, prevention is far better than the cure. That goes double for businesses, which stand to lose big if they fail the cybersecurity test. With these 10 key security skills in your team, you stand a better chance of protecting your business.
Looking for more info about cybersecurity? Make sure to take a look at our resources.
