Every year on 28th January, the US, Israel, Canada, and 47 countries from Europe observe Data Privacy Day. The primary purpose of the Data Privacy Data is to encourage discussion on the essence of online privacy. These dialogues also seek to inspire businesses and individuals to take action to safeguard data, allow trust, and respect privacy.
Now, in addition to your company currently having more data than ever, it is likely that you have the data spread out over more sites, software services, and users than ever, as well. What this means is that besides data safety being more essential, it is also much more complicated. In this article, you will learn about the best steps to take to guarantee long-term protection for your business.
Keeping your business data safe and organized needs to be top of your priorities again and again, not only due to the updated guidelines but also because the general IT security world seems bleak. According to research by Statista, the United States businesses rated cyber-threats as the leading threat to their companies followed closely by an interruption in crucial business processes like supply chain.
It is alleged that small and medium businesses will be highly vulnerable. The reason for this is not due to their scarce resources to laying down security measures, but because hackers are currently starting to target this group of investors. Luckily, long-term data protection for your company can be categorized into a repeatable procedure like most IT chores. Here are the measures to put in place to guarantee perfect data protection for your business.
Train Your Staff
Companies can utilize a security awareness training course to educate their workforce about the significance of data security. The security experts recommend that businesses start by forming a team to design a workable plan for the security awareness training course. Training from the top is vital for the success of this program. As a result, it would be wise for your team to include both the executive management and the initiative leaders in the training program.
At this point, the team can start designing the programs to educate the company’s employees, including the executive level managers. This training program needs to consist of phishing testing and digital security best practices. Also, the program should address the initiators of malicious conduct to alleviate the risks of insider threats.
Encrypt Your Data
There are various point to point protection software providers that can assist you in encrypting your data as it transfers within your network, as it stays untouched in the servers, or even as it moves away from your network. In simple terms, encryption basically turns your plaintext formatted text into a ciphertext format, which is an uncrackable combination of your text’s exact plaintext sequence. It would help if you used a de-encryption key to unscramble and make your data readable. Thus, whenever the hackers gain entry into your system and steal the files, they will only see the encrypted version instead of the plaintext file.
Remember, attacks can occur at various stages during the data transfer process. For instance, it can happen when you are sending data from the server to its destination. While attacks can occur as data is archived in the servers, hacks can occur as your information is transferred within your networks.
With this in mind, it would be wise to encrypt your data via quantum encryption technology. Quantum encryption utilizes quantum mechanics principles to encrypt your data in a manner that nobody outside the intended receiver ever reads it. It is impossible to unknowingly interrupt the data since it takes advantage of the quantum’s numerous states alongside its ‘no change theory.’ However, you will need to have a powerful quantum computer that can comfortably encrypt and decrypt data.
Adopt a Data-Centric Security Policy
The standard network boundaries have been eliminated by the IoT (Internet of Things), mobile, and cloud. As a result, companies need to be aware of the approach of network security from a more strategic and holistic perception. IT security experts advise companies to mainly adopt a data-centric approach through which they create a vital understanding of the type of data they have as well as how treasured the data is to the operations of the business.
After determining the type of data in your company, you need to encrypt the data instantly. As part of deploying data-centric security approaches, businesses need to design a reliable backup strategy and evaluate the policy and the backups regularly.
Backup Your Data
If your office gets broken by a storm or your company systems get hacked, then having a proficient backup in place will assist you in getting up and running with negligible data-based problems. A cloud backup of your systems will ensure that, after a mishap, your organization can be up and running within the shortest time possible. If you fail to back up your data and then a tragedy occurs, it means that you have to start your business from scratch.
The good thing about backups is, when used alongside endpoint security software, it enables you to spot security threats as they happen, eradicate them from your network, and then return your network to its most secure and most recent state. There are countless simple and easy tactics to back up your data, including configuring automated backups with various third-party applications. Regardless of the backup option you opt to use, and you must begin backing up your company’s data as soon as possible.
Deploy the MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication)
Most users are fast to change their login credentials after a public expose of the data breach. However, the damage is already caused by this time. According to the security experts, most victimized organizations do not identify any data breach until after hundreds of days after the attack. This aspect gives the hackers sufficient time to compromise the exposed accounts before any user notices what is happening.
Realizing this threat, companies need to consider extra steps to protect their employee’s company accounts against any concession. A company can achieve this by using the MFA and administrative privileges for all administrative account access types. Besides, a company needs to persuade the workforce to adopt MFA throughout their personal web accounts.
Use Firewall
Would you build a house without a front door? Probably, you wouldn’t. Then, why do you want to run a business network without a firewall? A firewall is responsible for blocking unwelcome traffic against entering into your business network. What this means is, you will have the ability to maintain a private internal network without revealing your business data to the public servers where the business operates from.
Firewalls are ideal for keeping away hackers that need to find open ports and services or scan your network and look for ways to access it remotely. One good thing about firewalls is, they give you the chance to set the guidelines, which can be used by IP addresses to monitor incoming and outgoing traffic or even access a couple of resources.
Implement Caution For Patch Management
Another tip is that companies can boost their data’s security by patching weaknesses through which malicious attacks could gain entry into the company’s assets. A company can do this by installing a patch management program for testing the patches before their deployment in the production systems. A company’s engagement with a security fix should not come to an end after its implementation. In fact, an organization must follow up on a patch’s application by thoroughly scanning the system to ascertain that the loophole is no longer present.
Just the Start Of Long-Term Data Protection
Data-centric security approaches, using firewalls, MFA, security awareness training, and data backup are some of the efforts that companies can use to boost their data security. All in all, businesses can deploy extra measures to formulate their systems for prolonged data protection.
