Earlier this year, I spent time helping a company as it responded to a serious security incident. During that engagement, I had the opportunity to witness firsthand how a lack of planning can hamper incident response efforts. My takeaway was simple: Effective incident response requires proper preparedness.

While that sounds like a common-sense conclusion, the stark reality is that many organizations simply don’t have a solid incident response capability, and that fundamental gap limits their ability to even determine whether they’ve been compromised.

Here are five steps to building an effective IR plan — before a cyberattack occurs.

Recent events turned our working lives upside down. With very little notice, millions of people around the world were sent home from their offices to suddenly adopt a remote work lifestyle. Four months into this adventure, most knowledge workers have adapted to working styles that replace conference rooms with video meetings and coffee chats with virtual happy hours.

I believe that we’ve arrived at a new normal where remote work will become a standard arrangement for knowledge workers. Both companies and employees will benefit from this approach. While employees can better balance their lives, companies will be able to reduce overhead expenses by consolidating and eliminating expensive physical offices. This work style comes with new cybersecurity considerations, and I urge organizations to adopt six key practices to adapt to our new working patterns.

In my work with CDW customers, I often come across technology leaders who want to improve their cybersecurity posture but aren’t really sure where to start. They might recognize that their organizations need to improve their cybersecurity controls but don’t know where their investments will pay off the most.

When I hear concerns like this, I immediately look to the Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). While there are many different cybersecurity standards out there, I prefer this one because it uses plain language to describe the five most important activities in cybersecurity. I’d like to walk you through this framework using two different examples.

The sudden shutdown of physical offices across the country this spring has accelerated many organizations’ journeys down the digital transformation path. Companies that had previously been reluctant to adopt tools such as videoconferencing and cloud collaboration rolled those solutions out to users in a rush as they scrambled to enable remote work. Because they deployed so many solutions in such a short period of time, most organizations will want to undertake some sort of security assessment to be sure they haven’t opened themselves up to new vulnerabilities. But this moment also presents an opportunity for organizations to provide a permanent boost to their cybersecurity practices through ongoing engagements.

Here are three examples of CDW’s high-value cybersecurity offerings.

I have a unique perspective on healthcare cybersecurity, having spent the beginning of my professional career as a practicing nurse and later moving into cybersecurity consulting. That perspective helps me critically examine the security programs at the many hospitals, physicians and other provider offices that I visit as part of my CDW practice. During conversations with healthcare IT teams, I’ve identified three crucial best practices to protect patient information: vulnerability assessments, penetration tests and incident response playbooks.

Let’s explore each of these critical topics.

Last year, I consulted with a pastor whose church had suffered a ransomware attack. This particular church had an extensive fundraising operation designed to support a local homeless program, and the ransomware infection impacted all of the data used to solicit donations — and ground those important efforts to a halt.

Like many nonprofits, the church fallen into a common trap: the fallacy of thinking that they don’t have any important data that would attract attackers. But, in this world, every organization is a potentially lucrative target.