First, he suggested adopting a few good habits to live by:

When Rushing says "real" he doesn't mean the biggest, most expensive technologies money can buy. In this case, real means that when the defenses are set up, the IT shop actually pays attention to the various devices and tools. Setting them up and walking away is the opposite of what should be done.

He pointed to patch management in particular as something many companies do wrong.

"Ninety percent of the world installs the patches right on Patch Tuesday," Rushing said. "The other 10 percent have a rigorous testing process that takes up to a week because they don't want the patches to break things. The proper approach is to realize things break and get good at unpatching quickly and effectively."

Learning to quickly uninstall patches that break things means you can shorten the patch deployment process considerably because you're not wasting days on the testing process, he said.