The New Year presents companies with an opportunity to review their IT environment to improve its performance, efficiency, and security. While the performance and operational efficiency of its IT infrastructure are crucial for any business, robust security is essential. Strong security is necessary to protect a business from damage by external threat actors and malicious insiders.
Organizations should use the following checklist as a starting point for enhancing their security posture in 2026, protecting the IT environment this year and into the future.
Elevate Security to a Governance Issue
Your organization must understand that security is no longer strictly an IT function. Everyone in the company needs to be invested in securing the IT environment and its data. Companies must adopt and maintain an enterprise security framework, typically aligned with industry standards such as ISO 27001 or NIST 800-53.
An individual should be assigned as Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) or a similar designation and be responsible for driving security initiatives. The CISO should institute executive and board-level security reporting to keep all stakeholders informed of emerging issues.
Implement Strong Identity and Access Management (IAM) Policies
Companies must ensure that only authorized individuals have access to their IT systems and data assets. Comprehensive IAM policies are crucial for protecting the environment. Businesses should incorporate the following elements throughout the organization to keep unauthorized entities from accessing IT resources.
- Teams should enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA) for privileged accounts, cloud platforms, SaaS applications, and all remote access requests.
- Users should have least-privilege access and be subject to role-based access controls (RBACs) that grant them only the permissions they need to perform their jobs.
- Businesses should eliminate shared and generic accounts that threat actors may leverage.
- Teams should create automated workflows to ensure consistent security across onboarding, offboarding, and user role changes.
Adopt Zero Trust Architecture
Sophisticated threat actors and motivated insiders may bypass perimeter defenses and launch attacks from within your infrastructure. A zero-trust architecture continuously authenticates and authorizes users and devices for every access request. No one is trusted based on previously granted access requests.
Companies should perform microsegmentation to restrict access to specific networks and workloads. Segmentation limits the risk if part of the infrastructure is compromised. Teams should monitor session behavior and act quickly to address potentially dangerous anomalies.
Evaluate Data Protection and Privacy Measures
Threat actors target your data with ransomware and other malware variants. Companies must control data flow with comprehensive classification and handling policies. Sensitive and valuable data should be encrypted at all times. Organizations can take an additional step and mask data to render it unusable to unauthorized entities.
Teams should ensure data is regularly backed up and that the backups are validated for completeness. Companies must implement immutable or air-gapped backups that cannot be modified or compromised, since ransomware attacks often target and corrupt backup media, making data recovery impossible. Businesses with on-premises backup solutions should consider cloud-based backups that store data offsite for increased protection.
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Plans
Your business must be prepared for unexpected outrages caused by cyberattacks or natural disasters. Teams must develop or refine disaster recovery plans to quickly and efficiently recover mission-critical systems and data. A reliable disaster recovery plan should include these elements:
- An automated backup procedure to ensure consistency and data availability;
- Encrypted backups to safeguard data from unauthorized use;
- Immutable backups that threat actors cannot compromise;
- Offline storage of backup media for enhanced resilience;
- Well-defined recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO);
- Incident playbooks to address ransomware attacks on virtual infrastructure components;
- Regularly scheduled and thorough testing to ensure the viability of the plan.
Harden Network and Infrastructure Security
Network security is still vitally important, even when the organization has adopted a zero-trust mindset. Businesses want to keep unauthorized entities out of the environment, and network defenses are essential to support this goal. Specific steps to harden network security include:
- Deploying next-generation firewalls and DDoS protection;
- Implementing intrusion detection and prevention solutions;
- Segmenting the network to limit the effects of a security incident;
- Performing continuous vulnerability scanning and quickly addressing weaknesses.
Strengthen Endpoint and Device Security
Your company’s endpoints are the top initial attack vector and must be secured to keep threat actors from accessing additional infrastructure elements. Modern businesses supporting a mobile workforce have extra challenges in protecting endpoints effectively. Measures to bolster endpoint security include:
- Deploying centralized endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions:
- Enforcing full-disk encryption for all devices;
- Developing secure device configuration baselines and procedures;
- Performing comprehensive patch and vulnerability management;
- Implementing remote device lockout and data deletion processes.
Focus on Cloud and SaaS Security
Companies must fully understand their shared security responsibility in protecting cloud and SaaS data. All cloud data should be encrypted at rest and in transit. Access to cloud resources must be monitored and logged. Teams must focus on correctly configuring cloud resources, as misconfigurations often lead to breaches.
Promote Security Awareness
Businesses should provide workforce security awareness training and require annual certification. Human error is responsible for many preventable incursions by threat actors. Employees must understand how to identify sophisticated phishing and social engineering attacks to prevent malware from infecting the environment. They should also be trained on secure password and credential handling. Teams should have transparent reporting procedures to address suspicious activity, allowing security experts to investigate.
How VAST Addresses Your Security Checklist
VAST’s IT services can help your company address security gaps and provide enhanced data protection and resilience. The following examples of our broad service portfolio demonstrate its benefits for your business.
- Our experts can fully manage your on-premises and public cloud environments, allowing you to focus on core business activities.
- VAST’s security lifecycle review detects vulnerabilities that put your business at risk.
- Our team can implement a cloud access security broker (CASB) to safeguard cloud resources.
- Companies can leverage our cloud backup-as-a-service (CBaaS) to streamline data protection with immutable, offsite backups.
- Your business can utilize disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) to protect your environment from manmade or environmental threats.
Contact us today to learn how we can help you secure your environment in 2026 and beyond, ensuring business continuity and protecting your valuable systems and data.
