Technology has opened up countless new possibilities for businesses to provide better services, improve the efficiency of their operations, and build stronger relationships with their customers.
But while the benefits of technology are clear, it has also brought new risks that can be detrimental to the livelihood of a business.
The past few years have marked a significant increase in the number of cyber breaches that have wreaked havoc on businesses all around the world.
That’s why more and more companies are becoming aware that if they want to protect themselves from cyber-threats, they have to take a proactive approach in seeking out the most effective ways of doing that.
Luckily, there are steps a business can take to reduce the chance of succumbing to threats online.
Here are five things your company can do to ensure that it is protected:
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1. Restrict Data Permissions
While the threat of an outside breach seems much more dangerous, the truth is that breaches from within the company are very common as well.
Each employee should only have access to the data that is necessary for their work – having company-wide access to the data for all employees can have much more dangerous implications because it becomes very difficult to trace when a breach occurs.
What’s more, sometimes employees may inadvertently become the reason for a breach if their data access point were to become compromised.
Doing comprehensive background checks for all of your employees is essential if you don’t want to end up paying the price when your data gets stolen.
2. Teach Employees Best Security Practices
Even though it’s important to be mindful of security threats from within the company, in the end, it’s the employees that can be the best security barrier for any potential intruders.
If you teach your employees the best practices when it comes to cyber security such as generating secure passwords, encrypting data, safely transferring files, and other essentials, it will be much harder for hackers to find a weak spot in your security system.
For example, you should implement strict password generation rules which would require all passwords to be at least ten characters long, feature both upper case and lower case letters, as well as include numbers and special characters. According to cybersecurity experts, this type of password is virtually unhackable and can significantly reduce the risk of a breach.
Educate your employees about the dangers of malware and how to prevent it, and also make sure that they understand how to safely browse the web from devices that could be used for a data breach.
3. Get Your Cybersecurity Evaluated
Sometimes it can be hard to truly understand your businesses weaknesses when it comes to protecting yourself from cyber threats, so it’s always a good idea to bring in an outside specialist who can evaluate your situation and point out potential weaknesses that could be exploited.
It will allow you to come up with a more well-rounded plan for developing a security strategy that protects your data against breaches and ensures that it will not be lost forever if something were to occur.
Bringing in someone with expertise can also be useful for educating your employees – you could organize a series of seminars for your staff that teach them about the most prominent online threats for a business and how to prevent them.
A company-wide understanding of the dangers and a clear action plan can go a long way in minimizing the risks and preparing the company to respond to any future cybersecurity-related issues effectively.
4. Encrypt Your Data
Companies can sometimes be wary of spending too much on their security, but the cost of investment will seem minuscule when compared to the potential losses that a data breach would result in.
Even something as innocent as logging into the company’s database from a public Wi-Fi spot could instantly provide hackers access to all of your data.
That’s why investing in a robust data encryption solution is always a wise choice – if your data and communications are encrypted, it will become much trickier for cybercriminals to gain access.
Today’s leading data encryption solutions allow encrypting all of your devices, external drives and hard drives, and even cloud storage.
This way, even if a hacker where to breach your system, he won’t be able to access the files, which is a safety net that no company today can do without.
5. Implement a Reliable Backup System
No matter how much you try to prevent a cyber attack from happening, there is still no guarantee that it will never occur. Hackers are becoming more sophisticated and advanced every year, and the cybersecurity industry will always be a step behind.
The only way to ensure that your data doesn’t go missing and is secure is to have a backup appliance that stores a backup of your data in case something were to go wrong.
Luckily, many companies offer complete systems designed to protect your data from cyber threats, as well as from natural disasters or almost any other kind of danger.
The multilateral protection of your data all but guarantees that your data will always be protected. What’s more, today’s backup services providers can offer you almost instant access to your data, restoring it quickly and allowing your business to run without any disruptions.
A few of the leading Enterprise Backup services providers even offer Data Resilience features which not only protect your data and apps from almost any type of issue but can actually be set up to automatically take action when a problem occurs and solve it in an instant without the need for human action.
After the data resilience system is set up, companies can rest assured that any threat or challenge will be detected, evaluated, and handled, all done automatically by an advanced and capable software system.