Core components of a cybersecurity program
If you’re new to the cybersecurity space, you may be wondering where to start, how to do it, what you need, and why you need it. Before scaling your security strategy, it's essential to build a strong foundation. The core components outlined below—such as asset inventory, multi-factor authentication, patch management, and network segmentation—serve as the building blocks of any effective cybersecurity program. Together, these practices help reduce risk, improve visibility, and limit attacker movement across your environment.
Asset inventory
A strong cybersecurity program starts with a clear understanding of what you're protecting. That's where asset inventory comes in. It's the process of identifying all the systems, devices, and applications connected to your network—so you know what exists, where it lives, what it's running, and who has access to it.
From a security perspective, an "asset" includes anything that can store or transmit data, such as:
- Coud applications
- Laptops and desktops
- Servers and firewalls
- Routers, switches, phones, and printers
If your inventory is incomplete, attackers may find and exploit overlooked assets. For example, if your HR team purchases laptops using a corporate credit card—without notifying IT—those devices may miss important controls like full-disk encryption.
To solve this, organizations often rely on asset discovery tools that combine IT asset management practices with automated scanning and endpoint agents. These technologies provide near real-time visibility into what exists on your network.
Asset inventory is also foundational to vulnerability management, since you can’t patch or protect what you don’t know you have. By maintaining an up-to-date inventory, security teams can more effectively detect gaps, prioritize risks, and improve response times when new threats emerge.
Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
Any good security program starts with security awareness training, including how to use multi-factor authentication (MFA) for accessing critical personal or business data. MFA is a key component of identity and access management (IAM), which ensures that only authorized users can access sensitive systems, applications, and information.
Forms of authentication fall into three categories:
- Something you know: A password, for example
- Something you have: A phone or bank card
- Something you are: A fingerprint
Passwords alone are fundamentally flawed—they can be stolen through phishing attacks, guessed, or compromised by malware. By only using a password, an attacker only needs to bypass one barrier to gain access. MFA makes this significantly harder by requiring multiple forms of authentication.
It's important to note that two forms of authentication must come from different categories to count as true MFA. For example, requiring both a password and an answer to a security question doesn’t qualify—those are both “something you know.” A more secure approach would be combining a password with a time-based code from a mobile device (something you have).
Patch Management
Simply put, patch management means making sure all of your software is up to date, installed, and configured correctly. This involves obtaining, testing, and installing patches (i.e. software updates) to your organization’s systems and devices.
To do this effectively, you’ll need to continuously stay aware of available patches, determine which ones are needed on what systems, oversee their installation, and test for issues after the patch. This is typically handled as a partnership between IT and DevOps teams, as opposed to the security team.
Patch management plays closely with vulnerability management, the process of determining whether you have any vulnerabilities in your IT environment. There are three elements behind patch management: prioritizing vulnerability remediation, evaluating compensating controls (i.e. existing security techniques or systems that lower vulnerability risk), and ensuring patches are installed correctly.
Here’s why these elements matter: applying a patch will sometimes break another part of the software you’re using, causing more harm than good. Understanding this inherent risk will play a large role in how you prioritize which patches to apply.
In the event a patch does break software – requiring you to remove the patch – then having compensating controls in place will make it harder for an attacker to exploit vulnerabilities that reemerge. An example of a compensating control would be implementing firewall rules that limit the number of systems that can communicate with a not-easily-patched vulnerable system.
To help mitigate potential fallout, it’s a good idea to test patches on non-critical systems or in test environments that mirror your production environment.
Decentralization for cybersecurity
Decentralization is a security design principle that spreads systems, services, and data across multiple environments—rather than concentrating them in a single location. By separating critical assets and applications, organizations can limit the scope of an incident if a single system is breached.
This approach not only reduces the risk of widespread compromise, but also supports lean security teams by allowing trusted vendors to manage parts of the security stack independently.
Containing the impact of a breach
In a decentralized environment, if one user account, endpoint, or application is compromised, the attacker’s reach is typically limited to that isolated system. This containment reduces the risk of lateral movement, where an attacker jumps from system to system inside the network.
For example, if an attacker gains access to a local file-sharing system in one office, a decentralized architecture ensures they won’t automatically have access to cloud-hosted customer data or corporate email servers. The more fragmented the environment, the harder it is for attackers to escalate their access.
This approach forces attackers to spend more time and resources, increasing their chance of being caught or giving up entirely.
Supporting small teams with vendor-based decentralization
For small or resource-constrained teams, decentralization also allows third-party vendors to manage and secure their own hosted environments. Many cloud service providers have dedicated security teams and layered protections in place that exceed what small internal teams can manage alone.
When vendor systems are logically segmented from internal systems—and when a clear vendor management process is in place—your team can focus on securing the core network and endpoints, while the vendor assumes responsibility for protecting their service.
This shared responsibility reduces internal workload and enhances the overall cyber resilience of your organization’s cybersecurity program.
Network segmentation for risk reduction
This is the process of determining which of your network systems and devices need to talk to each other, and then only allowing those systems to talk to each other and nothing else.
For example, consider a nurse working on a hospital laptop. In a securely segmented network, the laptop would only be able to talk to one or two other systems, such as a print server (for printing patient records) and the patient record application itself. However, in a “flat network” – a network with no segmentation between systems – this laptop could talk to every other system on the network. If an attacker compromises that laptop, they’ll be able to attack those systems through completely unchecked lateral movement.
To segment your network effectively, it’s essential to inventory your most critical assets, understand where they sit on your network, and the specific systems and users that can access them. If the assets are accessible by more than those systems and users, that should be remedied.
To minimize a system or application’s overall attack surface, try to always grant access based on the principle of least privilege access (LPA). You’ll also need to ensure nothing on the network is able to communicate directly to your database servers, which is where critical application data is typically stored.
Building a strong security foundation
Once you’ve implemented the core practices outlined above, your environment will be significantly harder to breach. Increasing the time, complexity, and cost of an attack makes it more likely that adversaries will be caught—or give up altogether.