Data protection is of paramount importance for today’s businesses. We are living in a technological future, in which data is everything – from login credentials to online banking platforms to digital medical records and beyond. Whatever your business is, there will be information within that would be costly to lose. With the nation having lost hundreds of billions of dollars to cybercrime, the best time to act is now. What can you do to protect company data?
Employee Training
A key thing to understand about cybersecurity is that, while the risk of ransomware incidents and complicated hacks exists, it is not the reality for which you should be preparing. Consider this: there are very few burglars who know even the first thing about picking a lock or disarming a security system. Instead, burglaries are often crimes of opportunity, spawned by an unlocked door, an open window or a vacant neighbor.
This can very much apply to data security and cyber-safety too. The weakest link will always be human, whether an administrative staffer who fails to recognize a fraudulent email or a lax receptionist who lets someone in without ID. To this end, training is the best possible thing you can do for your business. Training helps reduce the risk of phishing scams enabling bad actors to access your systems while heightening on-site security too.
Secure Systems
This is not to say that you shouldn’t be investing in your infrastructure, too. Any software you use should be updated to the newest patch, in order to protect login credentials and other personal information held within. A secure intranet ensures your employees can safely share data with one another without the risk of external influence. This applies just as much to the hardware infrastructure as it does to software. Indeed, the security of your business’ devices could be more important to the protection of data.
Again, the weakest link in any organization is humans; if a staff member leaves their desk without logging out of their computer, they are inviting others to take a seat and take their fill of that computer’s contents. That said, if cyber-scammers are targeting a data bank of yours, they are much more likely to cut your power and physically steal your data than waste hours breaking encryptions or stealing passwords. To this end, an uninterruptible power supply to your server rooms and electronic locks can deter would-be trespassers from access.
Hierarchy of Access
Another easy way to ensure the safety of your business’ information – particularly where the information is valuable and proprietary, as opposed to collected personal data or passwords – is to establish a hierarchy of access. Only employees of a certain seniority should have the credentials to access certain areas of your premises, with only the highest ranking being privy to the full extent of the information available. Password information and access to each department can also be decentralized, ensuring that no one person ever has the ‘keys to the castle’.
