Unlike other business upgrades, investing in cybersecurity won’t immediately impact your bottom line. Yet cyberattacks are a real and present threat to any organization and its customers today.

Hacking is more common than people think, and The Economist predicts that cybercrime will become an even bigger problem in 2018.

“The companies that aren’t taking security seriously now are going to come to regret it in the future.” – The Economist technology reporter, Tim Cross

The more everyday items become connected to the internet, the more opportunities arise for hackers to not only mess with credit cards, but also with computerized refrigerators or, God forbid, pacemakers.

To maintain the faith of your customers and protect your business from catastrophic data compromise, you will need a comprehensive cybersecurity plan. A great starting point is Beyond Cybersecurity: Protecting Your Digital Business – a well-researched manual on how to develop “digital resilience” for your organization.

1. Prioritize your most valuable information assets

IT experts must work with information officers and senior management to ascertain what types of data breaches would cause the most harm to your organization and its reputation. Besides establishing a “baseline level of security” for all company assets, find ways to build extra protections around the systems and databases that host your most valuable assets.

2. Be proactive

Develop an incident response plan that will help you respond to cyberattacks quickly and effectively. Engage cyber threat hunters who look for threats that are already in your organization’s IT environment.

3. Enlist the help of everybody

Besides ensuring that your cybersecurity team stays on top of its game, educate leaders and employees across the organization on how they can help protect company data and minimize cyberthreats.

4. Modernize IT

Move your company information to the private cloud as opposed to storing it in less secure data centers; use the public cloud selectively; build security into applications; virtualize end-user devices; and reduce the use of e-mail as a substitute for document management tools.

Finally, share your experiences and best practices with others. Cybersecurity information sharing is crucial for creating a safer online environment for everyone.