Since time immemorial, collaboration has been essential to how work gets done in organisations. Today's businesses compartmentalise their operations and personnel for better understanding and delegation of roles and responsibilities, making the sharing of resources and information between the different entities necessary for managing massive workloads. Cybersecurity through collaboration includes communication between workers from different departments, and between different service partners in your supply chain.

Cybersecurity is just as important as any other business function. So, collaboration can be used to proactively improve the data security of communication channels and digital networks in your organisation.

Why you need collaboration for cybersecurity

Organisations use a host of digital tools and channels to share operational information with service partners or between employees in different departments. For example, your customer service team receives valuable feedback from your clients, which is then passed on to the marketing and manufacturing departments for future use. Communication through such channels leaves you vulnerable to sophisticated cyber threats. Collaboration allows your stakeholders to be ready for new and evolving cyber threats and take measures to deal with them.

A)    To share security expertise

There are large volumes of data generated and shared every day within and outside an organisation. This data is mostly related to the organisation’s business operations. Collaborative cybersecurity enables your employees in other locations, or your external service partners to warn you about new types of threats that may have impacted their systems or operations. Additionally, they can also share the ways in which your organisation can brace their IT infrastructure for such an attack and thwart it before it could devastate your devices and cloud databases. This can be compared to Vessel Traffic Services (VTS) and weather departments sending emergency warning signals to the disaster response officials on land so that the impact of an incoming hurricane can be minimised as much as possible.  

B)    To ensure proactive data security

As stated earlier, the latest data security threats are incredibly powerful and can cause great damage to your IT infrastructure. To minimise the damage caused by such continuously evolving threats, organisations need to take pre-emptive measures. Proactive data security measures are the only way businesses can defend their valuable data from external and insider threats. The cybersecurity team in your organisation can greatly benefit from receiving information from your service partners and other sources to beef up your cybersecurity infrastructure.

How you can implement cybersecurity through collaboration

A holistic approach to cybersecurity makes all your stakeholders an active data security component in your organisation. Such an approach is key because cybersecurity through collaboration depends on real-time information sharing for proactive protection of your sensitive company information and customer data. Here are two ways in which cybersecurity through collaboration can be achieved:

A)    To ensure cross-functional data privacy

Ensuring cross-functional data privacy and cybersecurity requires the presence of a data security team. A cross-functional data protection team needs to include individuals from all the departments of your business (marketing, sales, finance, legal, production, quality control, and others). The presence of experts from so many fields allows your cybersecurity team to gather information about what data can be considered to be sensitive, the attack surface areas in each department, the types of attacks most commonly faced by each department, and so on.

For example, your IT department will have greater knowledge regarding the hardware and software risks related to your organisation's IT infrastructure. Similarly, your product development department will allow your cybersecurity team to know about their project, product lifecycle and developmental planning information related to your products. The data analytics team will provide information about the complexities related to big data, AI implementation and similar factors that will need specific measures for cyber-protection. Your marketing team will provide information related to customer data and super-confidential marketing campaigns. Finally, your legal tea will have the maximum knowledge about changing compliance regulations and the ways in which adherence to guidelines can be ensured. Additionally, the different cross-functional communication mediums and channels can be identified with all the information. With information related to the subject matter and risk vectors of each department, your experts can implement the data security tools and measures that will provide customised long-term threat protection to each department while also safeguarding the cross-departmental communication channels.

B)    To establish open communication with peers and partners

It is not a given that information about data security threats will only be received from your own stakeholders. Occasionally, your rival organisations may share information with you regarding a bigger cyber threat. In such cases, information and resources can be shared to collectively fight against the bigger enemy.

Information Sharing and Analysis Centres are non-profit organisations that act as a centralised resource for the collection and sharing of information related to data security threats. ISACs allow organisations to exchange information related to new threats detected in the public or private sector. The information received from an ISAC can allow you to proactively gain information about the root causes, threat types and observed incidents related to new cyber-attacks. Communication with peers and, especially, partners facilitates sharing of experience, knowledge and threat analysis.

ISACs are present in several countries such as Canada, United States, India and many European countries too. Information stored and retrieved from these resources enable the creation of data security rules by policymakers in these countries.

As we can see, organisations can use cybersecurity through collaboration to pre-emptively tackle cyber-attacks, put threat response measures in place and, on the whole, take preparatory measures for improved threat detection, prevention or mitigation.

To ensure that collaborative cybersecurity is implemented to perfection, your organisation will need the most reliable data security tools. Gajshield’s data security firewall systems and other tools ensure that you can create a holistic cybersecurity ecosystem for your valuable data and organisational devices.

Please contact us to discover more details about our cybersecurity courses and world-class data security products and services.