There are numerous businesses that aid with the growth of the economy throughout the world, and one of the most lucrative of these enterprises is manufacturing. In the 21st century, manufacturing companies do a myriad of tasks, and understanding how important these types of business are is essential. Although at first thought manufacturing may not be thought of as a digital industry, in the 21st century this field has an incredibly large cyber footprint. Manufacturing businesses conduct a myriad of business online, and have all of their files and business dealings stored on digital databases. Running a manufacturing business is always a challenge, but with the heightened threats of cyber criminals, it has become even more difficult in recent years. In order to run an effective manufacturing company, you need to ensure that your sensitive data is secure, and you can do this by managing your business’ digital risk.
What is Digital Risk?
Understanding digital risk is crucial to learning how to manage it for your manufacturing business. It is crucial to learn about the threats of digital risk in order to know how to protect yourself from it. Digital risk can be split into three major categories: data loss detection, attack surface reduction, and defending online brand security. Data loss detection is the process of monitoring exposed data, attack surface reduction is the process of defending the business’ IT infrastructure from hackers, and defending online brand security entails searching for impersonations of your brand on social media and other outlets. Once you know these three groupings, learning how to manage digital risk becomes simpler.
How to Manage Digital Risk
After learning about the various facets of digital risk, it becomes much easier to learn how to manage and defend your manufacturing company from it. There are several excellent approaches to deal with managing digital risk, and if you want your company to be safe from cyber criminals, then you need to learn about these methods. The first approach involves identifying essential business assets and understanding the types of sensitive data your company has that it needs to protect. The way to figuring out these potential risks is to think about what threat actors would try to steal from your business’ records. The next step is to monitor for unwanted exposure of your company, such as on the deep and dark web, git repositories, criminal forums, and other online locations.
After determining your digital risk, you then must actually protect yourself against it. The best way to go about this is to set up a tactical mitigation strategy – this will have numerous facets to it and will need to be specific to your business. You should start by removing offending content from websites by reviewing social media, ISP abuse notifications, and legal notices that offer removal tools. You can then utilize operational mitigations, like implementing a monitoring strategy, embed security operations to understanding exposure points, and measure and report digital risk. All of these strategies will provide you with greater visibility on your business’ overall safety, in order to learn about your company’s overall exposure to digital risk.
Final Thoughts
The manufacturing business, while not always directly dealing with Internet technologies, certainly has to protect itself from numerous digital threats. Understanding digital risk management and how to defend your business from it is essential in order to run a successful manufacturing enterprise.
