SMB Security Improvement Guidebook

Purpose / premise - cybersecurity for SMBs, particularly in cloud environments, is a delicate balance between maximizing risk reduction and minimizing resource requirements. We propose seven risk categories to assess for SMB security posture baseline, using your CSP security capabilities as the initial verification steps.

TL:DR / Executive summary: Obtaining a much higher confidence level for your security risk posture is doable, especially using the provided CSP security capabilities. Using the top cyber threats ranked on impact, we provide a tailorable process to reduce the top risks in a structured manner, minimizing resources. Thus, improving your risk posture confidence level by upwards of 90-95% – affordably.

Background. Our approach identifies the top security efforts that SMBs can implement to significantly reduce their risk exposure. These recommendations are designed to provide substantial risk mitigation with minimal added resources, against the top security threats, including phishing, ransomware, insider threats, and cloud misconfigurations, while being cost-effective and straightforward to implement using provided CSP security capabilities. The top prioritized risk categories are: IAM / Identity-Based Attacks, Ineffective Asset Vulnerability Management, Ransomware / Malware, Cloud Compromises / Misconfigurations, Data Theft/Exfiltration, Phishing / Social Engineering and Ineffective Computer Security Incident Response (CSIR).