As the number of cyber attacks targeting computers and other digital systems continuously rise, it is becoming crucial for organizations to have a solid system security in place. The failure to protect your systems from theft, damage, misdirection, or interruptions can affect your business and operations in negative ways.

Remember, an unauthorized access to your organizational systems can be very costly in terms of loss of business, damage to reputation, loss of customers’ critical data, business downtime, and possible litigations. A good cyber security service will have everything it takes to make your computers and other digital systems surefire.

So, how actually do you ensure to have an unfailing system security solution? Well, one of the most important components of system security is system hardening. A robust system security solution will harden your systems by decreasing their surface of susceptibility. If your system is large and used to perform multiple functions, the risk of security breach is higher for you. A small and solo-function system is relatively more secure than a large and multi-functional one.

No matter what type of new system you may have purchased, the hardening process is critical to establish a baseline of system security for your organization. Remember, when a new system is bought, it comes pre-installed with a number of software, applications, services, drivers, features, and settings. This can pose a security threat to your business. It is, therefore, necessary to remove the unnecessary functionalities and program and configure the necessary ones for additional security.

Here are the actions that are normally taken when performing system hardening:

• Disabling certain ports and stopping certain services
• Removing certain features of the operating system
• Uninstalling unnecessary and vulnerable software
• Changing default settings and removing features and applications not needed by your organization
• Ensuring each system’s security configurations are set properly
• Ensuring OS software, firmware, and applications are up to date
• Ensuring the system hardening process evolves constantly, with maximum automation and updating
• Testing during hardening of the systems to make sure anything critical to your organization is not impacted
• Updating the hardening to include new patches or software versions in the standard configuration, so the addition of a similar system in future does not come with the old weaknesses