Cybersecurity has played a critical role in 2020, especially because of the shift to an increased usage of digital products due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While we have seen an increase in the importance of cybersecurity within some organisations' strategy, it is important to understand the difference between compliance to cybersecurity guidelines or requirements and security itself. Compliance and security may have a similar meaning, but definitely have different impacts on a company's cybersecurity risk management activities.

• Compliance is ensuring that specific cybersecurity requirements are met. An organisation can be compliant and still be breached by a trusted user’s account being exposed.

• Security is actively protecting and preventing cybersecurity breaches.

Security is when an organisation goes a step further beyond compliance to meet specific cybersecurity requirements and take further actions to actively protect its assets from cyber attacks. It is when an organisation assumes a problem exists, while compliance is most often focused on prevention.

The Zero Trust Approach

Zero-trust security assumes no user or device is trustworthy. All authentication is continuously validated and recorded in real-time and rather than taking for granted that a user who logs on with the right credentials is who they say they are, a zero-trust approach is built on giving least-privilege access to that user. This limited access reduces damage and loss a potential attacker can achieve. It is a risk management approach that translates to: "trust nothing and record everything". If an organisation is only focused on compliance, likely, they will likely always going to be cleaning up after breaches, rather than hunting intruders before the damage is done. A  key element of the Zero Trust Approach is that users and assets aren’t trusted solely because they are on the network. User credentials need to be confirmed through identity management procedures that involve more than just a username and password.

CYBERWISER.eu Cybersecurity Training

The Zero trust is as much a cultural shift as a technological change, requiring organisations to start with the premise that the network is already compromised. Steps can then be taken to minimise the risk while still allowing users to access data and collaborate with their teams. Another step that can be taken is to train your staff to raise their cybersecurity awareness to better prepare them to recognise cyber threats when they will face one. CYBERWISER.eu offers a vast range of products to help you to protect your organisation from cyberthreats:

• SMEs Cybersecurity Assessment
• Open Pilots
• Primer Course
• Basic Course
• Intermediate Course
• Advanced Course