IT Management for Digital Assets

How IT Management Protects Your Business from Evolving Cyber Threats

These days, you can count on a lot of change in your business and industry, but one thing that won’t change is your need for up-to-date technology. Having the right tech tools in place is critical for your ongoing business success.

However, cyber criminals also understand that technology is key for your long-term success. That’s why they’re likely to make their own long-term plans for stealing your business data – and they’ll also use up-to-date tech in order to accomplish their nefarious aims.

In order to combat the increasing rise in cybercrime, companies planning for the future need to focus on careful IT management that protects their most vulnerable business assets.

What Types of Assets Are Criminals Looking For?

You already know you need to protect your office locations and equipment because those are tangible things. They’re physical assets. However, modern companies also have to protect their intangibles: digital assets such as data, systems, and login credentials. The latter is key right now because cyber criminals are increasing their efforts and focusing on credential theft. After all, your credentials offer an easy entrance into your systems and it’s often hard to tell when or if they’ve been stolen.

These days, login credentials are gaining in value on the Dark Web, which means your data is likely to become a larger target to cyber thieves in the months and years to come – yet business leaders at all levels are unsure how to protect these assets.

Digital Assets Are Hard to Secure

Most business leaders and office managers are pretty good at figuring out how to protect physical assets using fireproof safes, sturdy locks, off-site storage, and a solid insurance policy, but it can be difficult to determine how to protect items that don’t physically exist, such as logins.

This problem gets worse when you consider the 2018 LogMeIn survey, which found that 59% of people reuse passwords and credentials across multiple accounts and many use the same passwords year after year. If your employees (or you, yourself!) have been reusing passwords for a while, there’s a distinct possibility that your logins are already for sale on the Dark Web.

How to Improve Your Digital Asset Security

When planning your improved IT management strategy, your first priority should be to harden security for credentials that have administrative access to your systems. You can accomplish this with relative ease by coaching team members from the top down on proper password security. After everyone clearly understands the importance of secure passwords, require a large-scale password reset for all your systems. While you’re at it, carefully consider who needs admin access, and why.

After you’ve done the basic work of protecting those logins, you’ll need to carefully monitor your systems on an ongoing basis to ensure you can immediately identify if your re-secured systems have been breached.

However, since login credentials can be stolen from any system and because it’s nearly impossible to secure all your systems equally, you’ll need to determine which systems you should secure first.

This means you’ll need to build an understanding of what your key IT systems security priorities should be, in order.

How to Rank Your IT Security Priorities

You can determine which systems and assets are most critical to your business functionality when you assess the financial and productivity impact that each of your systems has.

• Would your business run smoothly if your eCommerce site went down for a week? How about if your in-house servers stopped working?
• Is your financial accounting software or CRM software critical to your organizational success day to day?
• Would a slowdown or delay in your operations technology cause a potentially disastrous impact for you or your clients?

While you’re considering these questions, remember to also think about the rest of the links in your supply chain.

• Which of your systems connect upstream and downstream, and how could tech problems in these systems affect your business relations?

Valuing your assets can be extremely difficult and time-consuming, but it’s of the utmost importance. After all, in addition to the costly downtime that a breach can cause, you may face noncompliance fines for losing track of your assets or data without notifying the authorities.

These fines can be especially embarrassing and expensive if poor IT management policies at your company obscured the fact that your systems had been breached.

Get Help Securing Your Systems and Credentials with Outsourced IT Management

Now that you know what you need to do to protect your systems and credentials from cyber criminals on the Dark Web, you need to figure out how to fit “identify, prioritize, and implement system and digital asset security” onto your already lengthy task list. Sigh.

You know that effective IT management and cybersecurity practices are critical for safely navigating today’s internet threat landscape, so you understand that figuring this stuff out is a high-priority activity. Honestly, though, you don’t have the time to sort out your digital systems right now and you’re not sure you’ll have the time to complete this task anytime soon.

But why are you putting this task off?

You wouldn’t leave your office doors unlocked for months until you had the time to change the locks.

You wouldn’t leave your accounting records lying in plain sight for months until you figured out where to shelve them.

Similarly, you shouldn’t leave your systems and credentials exposed for months while you wait for time to create a plan that secures them.

Fortunately, you can get help securing your digital assets right now.

For 30 years, Bit by Bit has been helping companies like yours effectively handle IT management and cybersecurity. With the experts at Bit by Bit helping you track and manage your systems and assets, you can rest easy, knowing that your systems are fully taken care of while you focus on what really matters: growing your business.

Request your free Dark Web Scan, so you can find out if your digital credentials have already been compromised and to learn more about the wide range of IT management and cybersecurity options available to help you protect these valuable assets.