Cyber Hygiene and Compliance: Why You Need More Than Just Best Practices
Over the years, corporate digital infrastructure has grown in terms of both complexity and scale. As a result, cybersecurity has become increasingly critical within organizations. However, despite this reality, it’s often basic mistakes that leave companies exposed.
That’s why it’s always good practice to go back to the fundamentals. From keeping systems updated and using strong passwords to enabling MFA, these cyber hygiene practices form the first line of defense in a landscape in which threats are getting more and more sophisticated. Yet, in an increasingly regulated environment, cyber hygiene is no longer about simply checking boxes - it’s about treating it as a core pillar of digital security, executed with precision and purpose.
Why Strengthening the Essentials is Still Key to Compliance
While cybersecurity best practices are widely recognized, in Europe, for example, only 42% of UK companies have implemented essential controls, and 38% of small and medium-sized enterprises across Europe don’t perform regular backups. These figures show that in an era when phishing, ransomware, and infostealers remain effective, basic measures are still not being applied consistently.
Adding to this is the growing regulatory pressure, which has become a cross-industry requirement, along with increasing supply chain risks. In 2024, there were 923 GDPR-related fines issued totaling more than €96 million, while supply chain attacks have increased by 431% since 2021, affecting over 183,000 customers in 2024. As a result, 60% of European insurers now require evidence of MFA, backup policies, and incident response plans.
Treating compliance as an isolated goal is no longer enough. True resilience is achieved by adopting a continuous and proactive risk management approach. Meeting frameworks such as ISO 27001, NIS2, and the GDPR requires more than written policies; consistent technical controls are needed with a security architecture that’s both effective and operationally sustainable.
From Cyber Hygiene to Layered Security
In this context, maintaining effective cyber hygiene today means going beyond basic routines. As technological environments grow more complex, organizations need structures that keep their security consistent across every front. Layered protection plays a key role in achieving this, providing the foundation to implement many essential cyber hygiene practices such as automatic updates, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and device monitoring. Each layer contributes to sustaining best practices within a defense strategy:
- Network: The firewall acts as the first line of digital hygiene, filtering traffic and preventing unnecessary exposure to threats.
- Endpoint: Keeping devices protected, patched, and monitored reduces the likelihood of infections or lateral movement.
- Identity: Careful management of credentials and privileges is key to preventing unauthorized access and impersonation attempts.
- Detection and Response: This makes it possible to identify, contain, and mitigate incidents when a threat manages to bypass preventive defenses. XDR capabilities and managed detection and response (MDR) services are becoming increasingly important.
Each of these layers strengthens cyber hygiene and reduces exposure to risk. However, as more sophisticated threats emerge, many organizations respond by adding new security solutions - often leading to higher costs, slower operations, integration challenges, and poorer results. True effectiveness comes from simplifying and managing all the defenses in an integrated way.
A unified security platform enhances client protection by centralizing visibility, detection, and response to threats within a single environment. By integrating multiple capabilities - such as endpoint protection, vulnerability management, identity security, and network protection - organizations eliminate tool silos, and reduce detection times through event correlation that makes it possible for more sophisticated attacks to be detected. The result is greater operational efficiency and, even more importantly, a smaller attack surface, minimizing the risk of infection in clients. MSPs play a key role in helping businesses put this approach into practice. Their technical expertise and understanding of their clients’ environments enable them to deploy protection layers coherently, ensure ongoing maintenance, and keep cyber hygiene measures active over time. In this way, the strategy becomes a real, continuous and well-managed protection framework, consolidating security that is truly precise and powerful.