Michael Menor is Vice President of Support Services for Tech Experts.

The data breaches at Target, Home Depot, Staples, Michaels, Anthem, and Sony Pictures Entertainment are just the tip of the iceberg and the stakes are very high. They’re costly for both businesses and customers and once the breach is announced, customers often terminate their relationship with that business.

You may ask, “What constitutes a data breach?” It is an event in which an individual’s information, including name, Social Security number, medical record and/or financial record or debit card is potentially put at risk. This can be in either electronic or paper format. The data set forth in this article is based on Ponemon Institute’s “2014 Cost of Data Breach Study.” Ponemon conducts independent research on privacy, data protection and information security policy.

New methodologies developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and other industry standards bodies, such as the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), are being implemented by many organizations, but best practices for addressing cyber security threats remain vague.

So what can be done to minimize cyber security threats? An effective starting point is to focus on the following essential building blocks of any cyber threat defense strategy.

Most organizations rely on tools like vulnerability management and fraud and data loss prevention to gather security data. This creates an endless and complex high-volume stream of data feeds that must be analyzed and prioritized. Unfortunately, relying on manual processes to comb through these logs is one of the main reasons that critical issues are not being addressed in a timely fashion.

Implementing continuous monitoring, as recommended by NIST Special Publication 800-137, only adds to the security problem as a higher frequency of scans and reporting exponentially increases the data volume. Data risk management software can assist organizations in combining the different data sources, leading to reduced costs by merging solutions, streamlining processes, and creating situational awareness to expose exploits and threats in a timely manner.

One of the most efficient ways to identify impending threats to an organization is to create a visual representation of its IT architecture and associated risks.

This approach provides security operations teams with interactive views of the relationships between systems and their components, systems and other systems, and components and other components. It enables security practitioners to rapidly distinguish the criticality of risks to the affected systems and components. This allows organizations to focus mitigation actions on the most sensitive, at-risk business components.

Effective prioritization of vulnerabilities and incidents is essential to staying ahead of attackers. Information security decision-making should be based on prioritized information derived from the security monitoring logs. To achieve this, security data needs to be correlated with its risk to the organization. Without a risk-based approach to security, organizations can waste valuable IT resources mitigating vulnerabilities that, in reality, pose little or no threat to the business.

Lastly, closed-loop, risk-based remediation uses a continuous review of assets, people, processes, potential risks, and possible threats. Organizations can dramatically increase operational efficiency. This enables security efforts to be measured and made tangible (e.g., time to resolution, investment into security operations personnel, purchases of additional security tools).

By focusing on these four cyber security building blocks, organizations can not only fulfill their requirements for measurable risk reporting that spans all business operations, but also serve their business units’ need to neutralize the impact of cyber-attacks.

These methodologies can also help improve time-to-remediation and increase visibility of risks.