Your data is the lifeblood of your company. Losing it to your competitors or cybercriminals can have serious consequences, including losing your reputation or credibility, experiencing operational downtime issues, losing money to legal action or fixing your systems, and losing intellectual property. While data breaches are now standard, innovative organizations take the proper measures to prevent them from happening and destabilizing them. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t do so, too. To enjoy the benefits of keeping your data secure, here are the steps you need to take.
Train Your Employees
Many data breaches are a result of human error. Without a savvy workforce regarding data security, organizations are more likely to experience data breaches than those with a well-trained task force. Suppose you’re running a small or medium-sized company. You should take this even more seriously because, according to a Symantec Internet Security Threat Report, six in every ten targeted attacks are made on small-to-medium-sized companies.[1]
You can have a security awareness program to educate your employees on data security. Among other things, the training should comprise the best practices in digital security and phishing testing. That will ensure that everyone in your organization understands how to mitigate the risk of a data breach. They will also know what to do in case they encounter suspicious activity.
Set Up Proper Measures to Communicate Your Data Securely
We all know how important it is to encrypt data, and our team at Artemis IT can help you do that effortlessly. However, you should go beyond just file encryption and adopt sophisticated options for communicating your sensitive data securely. For instance, we can help you to encrypt your email messages that contain sensitive data. This simple process makes it difficult for cybercriminals to intercept or monitor internet communications and access the messages.
Set Strict Cloud Permissions
Cloud computing has helped businesses boost their scalability, reduce disaster recovery times, and boost collaboration for their employees and customers. However, as you migrate to the cloud to enjoy these and many more benefits, you need to have effective ways to limit access to your cloud-based data. Something as trivial as a minor misconfiguration can expose the personal information of all your customers and partners. This is what led to Capital One Financing’s massive data and financial loss in 2019.[2]
Take the necessary measures to control people who have access to your cloud. Among other things, don’t allow direct Secure Shell connections from the internet. Taking this action prevents letting anyone who can find out the server’s location bypass the firewall and access the data directly. In addition, use the identity and access control tools provided by the major cloud providers.
Finally, when creating access control policies, make sure you grant the minimum privileges required and extra permissions as necessary. Ensure that your security groups have the narrowest focus possible; you can utilize reference security group identifications as needed.
Although there are many things you can do to boost the data security in your organization today, these are the top three ways. Do not be concerned if you don’t have a high-tech IT department to implement these and other security measures. Artemis IT has all the skills and experience to provide you with comprehensive security and help you manage it as long as you require. Contact us today to learn more.
References:
[1] https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Cybersecurity/Documents/Symantec_annual_internet_threat_report_ITU2015.pdf
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/30/capital-one-shares-dive-after-data-breach-affecting-100-million.html