In the last 18 months, around 79% of businesses experienced a data breach. To protect your business from the liability issues and financial losses that come with a data breach, you need to align physical and cyber security teams.
Aligning physical and cyber security teams allows you to implement a more cohesive security strategy that protects your data from both physical and digital angles. Keep reading to learn the top ways to protect data centers by integrating physical and cyber security teams.
Install Access Control And Video Security To Protect Data
Physical security is an essential element of cybersecurity. You must protect your digital assets, such as servers, inside your office building. You must secure your office building from third parties to prevent unauthorized access to your sensitive data and digital assets.
By merging your physical and cyber security teams, you can protect your data from both a physical and digital security standpoint.
Cloud-based access control is becoming an increasingly popular physical security solution. It enables security staff and system administrators to operate door locks and view security information from anywhere using a cloud-based control center or mobile application. Remote security operation ensures your security teams can respond quickly to any security breach that puts your valuable data at risk.
You should install access control in your building to make your sensitive data inaccessible to third parties. However, with an access control solution comes one major vulnerability. If a third party can steal access credentials and use them to enter your building, there will be no alert of a security breach, and they will be able to access your data quickly. To protect your business against such risk, you should install video security integrated with access control.
A cloud-based access control system has open API integrations that allow a commercial integrator to create integrated video security and access control. By integrating the two technologies, you can easily view data from both installations on a single interface, allowing you to verify the identity of users before they enter the building. If you did not integrate both security tools, you would have to manually access the data on disparate platforms and correlate timestamps to verify identity.
If you merge physical and cyber security teams, you can quickly implement facial recognition software to automate identity verification. Facial recognition software ensures your facility is completely secured from unauthorized users without increasing the workload of your physical security team.
Integrate Cybersecurity Policies Into Physical Security Hardware
Cybersecurity policies don’t just apply to your online operations. Some cybersecurity policies can help you to increase the efficacy of your physical security strategy. For instance, zero-trust can be applied to your physical security hardware to prevent internal security breaches.
Zero-trust is a cybersecurity policy designed to protect businesses from internally-caused cyberattacks. The approach ensures that simply because a user has credentials to access your network, they should not be able to access all resources and sensitive data stored on the network. Instead, each user on the system gains unique permissions to access only the data they need for daily operations.
This cybersecurity policy is beneficial for businesses operating under a hybrid work scheme. If an employee was working from home and their device was compromised, the cyber attack would only reveal a limited amount of data, not all of your company’s data.
The same principle applies to your physical security. Should every visitor, contractor, and interviewee that accesses your building gain access to your server rooms and sensitive data? You must restrict access to areas housing sensitive data, only granting authorized users to enter these spaces. So, to apply zero-trust to your physical security, you should implement smart door locks to protect spaces housing your company’s servers and sensitive digital assets.
Automate Notifications And Testing
One of the significant benefits of a cloud-based security system is that it provides security teams with the ability to automate notifications and testing. Your security teams can receive a notification on their mobile device if a security breach occurs. So, on-site or off-site, they will be consistently in the loop regarding building security events.
You can also automate testing to ensure no vulnerabilities in your security system. Your integrated cyber and physical security teams will be able to collaborate to ensure your physical security tools are protected from a cyber standpoint, implementing cybersecurity software and regular testing.
You can also automate security for HR to ensure that ex-employees are immediately offboarded from your security system when they leave the company. Your HR team must ensure all employees are offboarded from the security database to prevent a security breach in the future.
Summary
The modern security climate requires companies to protect their data centers from both a physical and cyber standpoint. Companies can create a strengthened security strategy by merging physical and cyber security teams. Both teams will be able to collaborate and implement solutions that future-proof your security strategy against the modern threat landscape.
