4 Simple Steps To Increase Your Company’s Security In 2017

Protecting your corporate data is more important than ever. Phishing schemes, ransomware, and other security breaches lead to compromised data. When one of these misfortunes transpires, your business will take a hit in reputation and lose money to boot. You must stop that from happening. Here are four steps to increasing your company’s security in 2017.

1. Employee Training

For major corporations, the average security breach costs $3.5 million. That’s a hefty price to pay for a preventable issue. [pullquote]To save money overall, you should start a training program to build security awareness.[/pullquote] Think of it as a small investment against the cost of compromised data.

Train your employees to recognize the many faces of hacking. Teach them that a difficult password can make all the difference in stopping an incursion. You should also require that the company changes its passwords at least once a quarter. Also, show your workers how ransomware and phishing schemes work. Then, teach them which websites are most likely to cause such hacks.

2. Improve Security Policies

Blaming employees for hacks is too easy. Many of the worst corporate data breaches weren’t due to any one person’s mistake. Instead, systemic issues existed that allowed hackers to infiltrate databases. That’s why you need to improve your security policies, and the process should start during the employee training above.

Have an open discourse with your workers about the specific responsibilities of each job. You’ll quickly realize that many unexpected sources have access to private data. Each of them is a potential breach. Take this opportunity to assign roles to various employees. Secure your data so that only the people who need it have it. This simple step of identifying data needs and vulnerabilities will strengthen your security dramatically.

3. Monitoring Software

No human employee is as effective in securing data as a well-crafted computer program. That’s because software doesn’t make mistakes the way that people do. When you use monitoring programs, you’re entrusting your information to experts. Over multiple iterations of their apps, they’ve learned how data breaches happen. More importantly, they’ve streamlined the process of preventing such mistakes.

By employing monitoring software, you’re securing your data in a vault that has no real key. Only employees with access to the program can get inside. Cloud access security brokers (CASB) are soaring in popularity since they offer such terrific products. They’re the data security guards who never sleep and never miss a potential data breach.

4. Change Your Data

The last strategy is to change the way that your company handles data. The first step is to differentiate personal from company data. Only the latter information is relevant. The next step is to encrypt all the corporate data such that a hacker can’t see the details, even when they compromise the system. The last step is to make backups of all critical data on site. That way, if someone does add ransomware to your data, you can flush your system by restoring the backup. Using these three steps, your data is almost impenetrable.

At the cost of $3.5 million per incursion, data breaches are a corporate nightmare. Follow the steps above to lock your most important data in a box that no outsider can reach.

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