Businesses adopt digital solutions to drive growth and improve efficiency. The benefits of going digital abound, from time savings to reduced errors, less paperwork, enhanced productivity, greater collaboration, name it.
However, it’s not all a rosy affair. One of the most evident challenges of digital transformation is security. Hackers are on the rise, waiting for the slightest opportunity to infiltrate business security systems and wreak havoc for financial gain.
Because of this, business owners must strengthen their security if they’re to survive the rapidly evolving digital world. This article outlines what companies should do to stay guarded.
- Establish a Comprehensive Risk Management Framework
Your business needs a well-defined plan of action to seamlessly integrate data security and cyber risk management practices. There are three main risk management frameworks you can adopt, as outlined below:
- Zero trust: This approach aims at verifying each and every individual and device that wants to access the business network. In other words, no entity is inherently trusted by default. The assumption is that threats both outside and inside the network are always present. And once a request is authenticated, authorization is granted with the fewest privileges required.
- Security by design: This approach emphasizes incorporating security measures from the very beginning of system development instead of adding them later. Such proactiveness counters both physical and digital threats. Also, you’re in a position to identify vulnerabilities and security gaps early enough, thereby pre-empting problems that could’ve occurred later. Moreover, through this framework, your team has more trust in your company’s systems, data, and information. As such, they can confidently take on innovative projects without fear of security breaches.
- Defense in depth: This involves integrating multiple layers of security solutions to develop a herculean defense mechanism able to scuttle a wide range of cyber threats. If one security control is breached, the next layer acts as a backup to ensure no threat succeeds.
Having the right framework makes your risk mitigation measures more comprehensive, ensuring you thwart all possible threats. Partnering with professional IT security firms to secure your business data is advisable. They can offer tailored and comprehensive advice on what risk mitigation framework best suits your business and how to implement it.
- Encrypt Data
Data encryption makes information unreadable for everyone who doesn’t have the decryption key. This access control strategy ensures that data remains secure whether on-site, in transit, or at rest.
Encryption is in essence an additional layer of security for compromised file records. It increases the time and effort cybercriminals might use to breach secured data. This gives you time to reclaim the data from the hackers.
For the best results, make sure to use a reputable encryption algorithm. Consider these popular encryption algorithms: Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA). By enlisting network security services from experts, you can be thoroughly guided on these encryption algorithms and even more cyber security aspects.
Then, store your keys in a secure location that can be accessed only by authorized staff. You may want to use a managed service to protect your keys without accessing your data.
Besides your primary data, ensure you encrypt backed-up data, as it’s always easy to forget this bit, yet it’s essential. Your encryption efforts might be futile if backed-up data is accessible.
Lastly, monitor activity on all devices that have access to encrypted data. This helps identify unauthorized activity on time for action to be taken.
- Enforce Strong Password Policies
Strong passwords are fundamental for a secure digital environment. As part of your security guidelines, instruct all team members to use complex passwords, typically combining letters, numbers, and special characters. Such complex strings are difficult for attackers to guess.
Furthermore, make it mandatory to change passwords every two or three months. This limits the amount of time a hacker can spend in your account. Sometimes, your account may be infiltrated without your knowledge. So, changing your password makes the old one less useful to the stealthy attacker.
Passwords go hand in hand with multi-factor authentication (MFA). This adds an extra level of protection by requiring users to provide two or more verification factors to gain access to a digital resource. Usually, someone requesting access will be asked to answer personal security questions, enter a time-based one-time password sent to their phone or email, provide a verification code sent via SMS, or respond to a mobile push notification.
- Regularly Update and Patch Software
Outdated software and systems usually have vulnerabilities, which hackers can take advantage of and gain access to. As such, you must regularly update and patch systems, applications, and software to install advanced features that are better at shielding your data from infiltration.
The good thing is that you can automate the updating process. Relying on manual updates isn’t advisable as humans tend to forget. Automating updates keeps your systems protected against possible vulnerabilities without direct involvement, giving you the much-needed peace of mind.
- Educate and Incentivize Staff
Human error is a weighty vulnerability in cybersecurity. If your team members don’t understand their role in protecting your company’s digital assets, so many things can go wrong. Hackers have mastered the art of luring unsuspecting persons into giving out sensitive information.
So, make it a priority to regularly train your employees. Cover topics like phishing emails, safe internet protocol, and how to report suspicious activities.
It’s also good to scale these education efforts by incentivizing employees to pursue advanced information security education. You can fully sponsor them, pay part of the fees, or reward those who complete these courses on their own. This empowers employees and also creates a team of in-house cybersecurity experts who can help identify and curb risks more effectively.
Conclusion
Strengthening business security is crucial in the highly risky digital world. Given how cybercriminals work round the clock to infiltrate business systems, you must invest corresponding efforts in shielding your business from attacks. The tips shared here are an excellent starting point for beefing up your company’s cybersecurity. But don’t stop there. There are a lot more strategies to bolster your online security. Educate yourself on these and consult cybersecurity professionals for tailored advice on what strategies will work for your business.
