Key Steps To Protect Your Company From a Data Breach

Cybersecurity has to be a key part of any business’ risk management strategy. Get everyone on your team ready to meet these threats, implement innovative technological tools, and establish smart policies. Here are some of the cybersecurity measures that you should prioritize.  

Control and Monitor Access to Data

When you integrate data from multiple sources onto centralized platforms or you begin using new applications that pull your business’ protected information from numerous programs, there has to be continuity in your user permissions. Only a select few individuals within your organization should be able to view certain elements or make significant changes to various systems and applications. 

Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management facilitates continuity with user permissions. Using CIEM tools to maintain effective access controls can proactively prevent the intentional misuse of your company’s data, and it also mitigates the risk of unintentional breakdowns in protocols that could present serious problems. This organizational precaution results in fewer vulnerabilities because it reduces the total number of users who could potentially put data at risk.

Secure Customers’ Data

Many business owners are even more wary about putting their customers’ data at risk than their own organization’s data, and with good reason. All of the most high-profile data breaches that have dominated news headlines involved personal and financial information belonging to many thousands or even millions of individuals. 

When companies can’t keep their customers’ data safe, they could face costly liability. Furthermore, the damage to their reputation may greatly hurt their image, causing them to lose people’s trust and also lose their business to competitors.

Collecting and storing customers’ information gives rise to a duty of care to keep it safe. To exercise an appropriate level of care, you have to create sound, comprehensive policies about how you store, send, and use the information that people share with you. Use secure, cloud-based storage solutions. Encrypt email messages that contain sensitive data. Devise clear, easy-to-understand policies about the purposes for which your personnel may access and send data. 

Utilize Smart Solutions in Hybrid Work Settings

Having remote workers access your network data and different applications from numerous different places can make it difficult to achieve consistency with your security protocols. You won’t be updating all of your workstations at the same time, and people’s personal activity online could make their work activity more accessible. If cyber criminals manage to infiltrate an individual’s home computers and network connections, the work that those individuals carry out could easily fall into the wrong hands. 

Evaluate whether your company’s current cybersecurity policies and programs align with the logistics of working remotely. Ensure that workstations are thoroughly protected with sufficient security settings and antivirus programs that thwart phishing. Give people who are working remotely access to live support to address cybersecurity concerns and respond to threats appropriately as they confront them.

Using VPN settings may help to mitigate certain data risks associated with remote work, but they can also interfere with speed and functionality. High-speed connections and well-maintained workstations can make using this safeguard more feasible.

Practice Full Compliance With Cybersecurity Laws

Federal and state governmental agencies have recently begun to exercise greater oversight of company’s data security. To some extent, these measures are an extension of consumer protection laws. They prompt companies to be vigilant about data, and they impose formidable penalties if companies fail to act with reasonable, due care. 

As a business owner, you have to be aware of these changes in the law as they unfold. Familiarize yourself with federal legislation involving the steps that companies must take to prevent and respond to data breaches. If your state has strong mandates pertaining to cybersecurity, complying with them could spare you from extensive liability and penalties. 

Online threats against commercial entities are multiplying rapidly, and the criminals who target business’ data use adaptive tactics to overpower defensive safeguards. To contend with treats and keep your business safe, your cybersecurity infrastructure and policies also need to be adaptive.