Cybersecurity hardening is a comprehensive approach to keeping your organization safe from intruders, and mitigating risk. By reducing your attack surface, vulnerability is reduced in tandem. Hardening (or system hardening) considers all flaws and entry points potentially targeted by attackers to compromise your system.

Complex cyberattacks dominate the headlines, making breaches seem sophisticated. In reality, most hacks are unbelievably simple and involve attackers targeting well-known configuration security gaps. In fact, cyberattacks are rather common. According to IBM, 83% of companies have experienced more than one breach while in operation.

Hardening the various systems across your network helps you improve your cybersecurity posture level and block attacks. Hardening includes regular patching of known software vulnerabilities and turning off nonessential services on each system to reduce the number of processes that can be exploited. Hardening your database servers is a vital part of this information security strategy.

If developers one day considered security a mere ‘good-to-have,’ that day is firmly in the past. As digital transformation accelerates, employee workstations become liabilities for enterprise assets and data, placing cybersecurity in the spotlight. On average, organizations face 130 security breaches annually, and every data breach costs a company around $4.24 million. For better or worse, remote work culture and corrupted credential are the top reasons for security breaches.

The coming of the internet was a beautiful thing, bringing about accessibility to reach everyone across the globe. But this reach is a double-edged sword. If everyone is just a click away, so are bad actors who can reach back to attack the organization at its weakest spot, trying to access information that it strives very hard to protect.

As cyber threats become increasingly advanced and complex, organizations are forced to adopt a military attitude of ‘war footing’ to secure their systems and servers. Although the use of new technologies has increased to manage complex workloads and operations, the vulnerability of data stored on devices continues to be a worry. Accenture research revealed that cyberattacks have soared by a shocking 125% yearly.