The modern digital age has given us several advantages in storing and securing our data. However, it’s may also put our IT and data security at risk if we’re not careful about the right updates at the right times. It’s not uncommon to read about businesses going bankrupt or suffering losses due to data breaches.
Companies today have a huge amount of data in their hands including their social security numbers, birth dates, and passwords. They’re also responsible for millions of business accounts and employee profiles. Hence, no business can deem itself safe from data hacks.
You can improve your data security by keeping up to date with the new technologies, proper employee training, decent storage software, and just plain common sense. Wondering how you can better your IT and data security? We take you through a few methods below:
Manage Access
Whether you’re a small startup or a large corporation, your data shouldn’t be out in the open. Keep an inventory of who has access to which kind of data. If any employee needs some data, allow them access only to what’s absolutely required. At all events, try to limit data access to a manageable number.
You should also hold a meeting with the admins of your departments. Each one of them should be aware of the security issues surrounding your company’s data. They should hence decide the type and extent of data access for each employee only according to need.
The Crown Jewels
All data is not created equal. Some information might be more sensitive and relevant to the success of your company than others. You need to conduct an analysis to determine the most important pieces of data on your server. This way, if there is a data breach, you’ll know exactly what to protect in order to save your company.
Hackers might break through your firewalls, so you may have to compromise certain data at some point. However, around 5 to 10 per cent of your data is what constitutes the base of your operations. If this is lost, your company might go bankrupt or lose its secure reputation due to leaked customer information. Hence, losing a few unimportant pieces of data is preferable to compromising those essential few percents.
A Security Policy
You should have a sound data security policy in place, no matter what the size or nature of your operation. Hacks or breaches attack without warning, so you should think ahead and know what to do when it does happen. Usually, such situations are a matter of ‘when’ rather than ‘if.’
The security policy will determine the level of access each employee should have in order to properly protect the data instead of compromising it. You should also hold regular meetings and keep updating your data security policy.
Strong Passwords
Your employee accounts need protection if you want to protect the data they have access to. Even if your employees are all implicitly trustworthy, their accounts might be vulnerable. The easiest point of entry for any hacker or scammer is to gain the password to an employee account. From there on, they can access what the employee does and also gain access to more.
You should hence enforce a strict rule about complicated, strong passwords for each employee. Make them use combinations of numbers, special characters, capital letters, and small letters. This will make it more difficult for hackers to gain any entry into the company network.
Employees should have stronger as well as complicated passwords. Guide the employees to set passwords which contain numbers, capital letters, and special characters that are hard to crack. However, u should make sure that that the passwords are unique.
Regular Backups
Backing up data should be a regular practice for each company and individual. There are several ways to go about this, including pen drives, the cloud, and external hard drives. While many hackers might want to steal your information in order to make use of it, there are many malicious entities out there who just want to do away with what makes your organization tick.
Hence, you should train your employees and managers to back up their data often and regularly. It’s not even just about protecting yourself from breaches but preventing any huge loss due to a power blackout, fire, or natural disaster. You also need to keep your logs in the cloud through tools such as Loggly – that will keep your performance monitoring intact, too.
The backup data also needs equal protection from hackers. You need a strong software program to fight such threats. Building business value about data security is also essential, as this will help employees back up their data both automatically and manually.
