The “Key” To Locking Up Your Systems: Digitally Securing Your Business
These days digital security is vital. Whether you are working with suppliers or liaising with customers, having a comprehensive security policy is as essential as a bank account. As strong as you think your firewall is, there are always hackers that can climb over or under it, and no should you think that you are exempt from data breaches because you’re a small business. In fact, it’s been shown that smaller businesses are as likely to be breached as their larger counterparts. This means you’ve got to craft a comprehensive security package. What are the ways to do this?
Limiting Access To The Data
This can seem like a backward notion. If you’re looking to provide comprehensive access to data, you need to think about who has access to it. Not everybody should have the same rights. Part of this is to do with the endpoint security aspects, but it’s also about ensuring that employees only have access to what is necessary. This can help a business to manage their information, ensuring that it’s being kept on a need to know basis, so data breaches are kept to a minimum. Because many businesses aren’t able to manage the risk when it comes to access, especially as insider breaches are more common than we think, by having information limited to the chosen few, this makes it far easier for businesses to manage the data.
Ensuring Encryption
Encryption is one of the most fundamental levels of protection. In terms of customers accessing your site, encryption means that you are providing the most secure experience. One of the simplest ways to deliver this is HTTPS (HTTP Secured), an encryption between a client and the destination, such as a website. Encryption encompasses many different facets, but if you are looking to protect data stored on a network, encryption is such a vital component to ensure that the business information doesn’t get into the wrong hands.
The Power Of The Password
A lot of security measures aren’t exclusively about strong firewalls or the systems; it’s down to the person using the computer. Security policies are vital in every aspect of a business. But this also means that we need to know what each individual can fall down on. Passwords are a very simple component that should be communicated as the gateway to sensitive information. Every employee should change their passwords on a regular basis, but when it comes to all the sensitive data in a business, the passwords need to be strong. This means that a different password needs to be used for each different system. When a hacker cracks one password, they try that password and all the other major accounts. So this boils down to the usual culprits: ensuring that the passwords have a combination of different characters and letters. In addition to this, you should think about having multi-factor authentication. This, in conjunction with comprehensive password login, gives hackers another layer to leap over.
Identifying Sensitive Data
Because the budget is always in the back of our minds, part of the battle is about identifying the types of risk our business is prone to. When it comes to risk in terms of data, it’s about identifying where the sensitive items of business information lie. As soon as you identify this, you can use the appropriate resources to protect the most sensitive aspects of your information. While sensitive business data won’t amount to much in terms of all the data you provide, because it’s the most important, it needs prioritizing. This is for the very simple reason that if this sort of information, like personal data, are infiltrated and breached, and this will lose your business money as well as its reputation. It’s the iceberg theory: while there’s so much underneath the surface, it’s the sensitive information you can see that needs to look after, and as this is the most obvious weakness for business and customer. A customer is putting their faith in your abilities to handle their sensitive information, like credit card details and banking information, in a secure manner.
Digital security is a difficult concept to grasp in the round, but as a business finds itself weighed down with the endless numbers of sensitive information, the more measures have to be implemented to increase the security of the business. Digital security, technical security, and the knowledge of the employees all need to work together to provide a comprehensive wall of security. It cannot be underestimated how important any security measures are in business now, and you don’t have to look far to see how devastating a security breach can impact any business, small, medium, or large.
Providing a daily digital source for motivation and inspiration for the perfect work/life balance.
Responses