With the rise of sophisticated cyber threats, the Network and Information Systems 2 Directive’s (NIS2) purpose is to protect critical services and infrastructure and hold EU corporations to higher standards, as cyber attacks have risen to 46.5% in EU countries.
NIS2 aims to strengthen cybersecurity for network and information systems across the European Union and builds on the NIS1 Directive.
NIS2 expands the scope of the original directive, covering a wider range of industries and sectors and applying to more than 100,000 entities across the EU. It classifies businesses into Essential and Important entities and imposes stronger security requirements and enforcement penalties. Once NIS2 is implemented, the NIS1 Directive will no longer be in force.
In order to streamline NIS2 compliance, organizations need to implement data protection strategies capable of safeguarding corporate data, meeting regulatory requirements, and supporting business continuity.
The importance of NIS2 compliance
With NIS2 becoming the standard across the EU, if a company is found to be non-compliant, a lot is at risk. Companies could face massive fines while management could personally be held responsible. Under NIS2, authorities have the power to require organizations to implement specific security measures, fix system vulnerabilities, and conduct audits and inspections to ensure compliance.
Failure to meet NIS2 requirements could expose companies to ransomware, data loss, and system downtime. NIS2 aims to strengthen cybersecurity across businesses in order to secure critical systems, protect data, and meet compliance.
Supply chains and third-party services working with companies are also required to meet NIS2 standards. As a result, organizations must conduct a vendor cybersecurity assessment. If the vendors are non-compliant, they may need to be dropped or the company may risk being non-compliant with NIS2.
Under NIS2, Essential entities, such as those part of the energy, transportation, financial, or healthcare industries, may incur fines up to €10 million or 2 percent of total worldwide annual turnover. Important entities, such as those in manufacturing, digital providers, postal industries, may face fines up to €7 million or 1.4 percent of their annual turnover.
Companies are required to report any cybersecurity incidents under NIS2, or risk substantial penalties. Affected individuals must receive an early warning within 24 hours, followed by a formal incident notification within 72 hours. A final report must be submitted within one month, with any subsequent updates added into the original incident report.
Implement NIS2 cybersecurity requirements with a purpose-built backup appliance
NIS2 provides a framework for data protection but it is up to organizations to determine how to implement measures to meet regulatory requirements. With ActiveProtect, companies can meet cybersecurity requirements with powerful backup and recovery features, unified management, and advanced security safeguards.
Data resiliency: Under NIS2, businesses must implement technical measures to ensure data is stored securely. To ensure that accurate backups are stored, ActiveProtect comes with automatic backup verification. In addition, self-healing is used to detect and repair any corrupt data.
Lock down your backups and store isolated, clean copies in a secure location via ActiveProtect’s air-gapping capabilities. Synology’s purpose-built backup appliance also comes with built-in immutability to prevent data tampering and deletion.
Business continuity: To align with NIS2 requirements and ensure business continuity, ActiveProtect includes a dashboard that lets users view protected workloads, backup status, deduplication ratio, and more, for data visibility.
ActiveProtect also comes with a built-in hypervisor so that companies can test their disaster recovery strategy in a sandbox environment to ensure successful data recovery when needed. Instantly restore your data in order to resume business operations as soon as possible when faced with threats of malware.
Data security: As NIS2 recommends encryption when necessary, ActiveProtect uses end to end secure data transmission to store data. When data is transferred to a remote storage site, AES-256 is used.
Data access safeguards: As NIS2 recommends using MFA or other authentication solutions to verify user identity, ActiveProtect comes with multiple user authentication methods and access controls. Set up user authentication via Windows AD and LDAP integration to centralize user management. Companies can also use SSO with existing MFA methods configured on your SSO/MFA server.
Assign user privileges and permissions via ActiveProtect for server access, backup and restore, or view-only access to limit employee access to data.
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