While hackers get most of the spotlight, your own organization could be one of the greatest threats to its own information security — and not necessarily in the way you might expect.
Non-malicious employees are often the ones responsible for jeopardizing company information. The cause? Lack of education. An uniformed employee can be a dangerous thing when it comes to keeping your company’s data safe.
Several security and privacy-oriented compliance regulations, including HIPAA and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), have already been put in place to mandate employee training and improve safeguards — giving many employers more than one reason to implement a strong security awareness program. If you’re creating, or simply want to improve your company’s security awareness program, be sure it includes these 5, often overlooked elements:
Metrics: How can you educate your employees if you don’t know which information they’re lacking? To create and execute the most effective security awareness program, you should start by surveying your employees to meter their existing level of knowledge. These results will give you a good idea of what they already understand about information security, and what topics they need to brush up on. With this information, your security awareness program will be more customized and therefore, more efficient for everyone involved. Combined with a post-program survey, you’ll be able to measure how effectively your program deepened your employees’ understanding.
The Whys: Making sure your employees understand the basic things they should and should not do to avoid security threats is the basis of any security awareness program; but if you’re not combining that education with the “why’s” and “why nots,” your training may not produce the results you had in mind. Employees need to be aware of why they’re not supposed to do something, and the consequences behind not following the suggested guidelines. Rather than simply telling employees not to open emails from unknown senders, your program should explain why this shouldn’t be done and what adverse effects could result by doing so.
Group specific training: You should educate all of your employees with the same basic guidelines, but different departments and roles may have a different set of guidelines, or may be at a heightened risk for security breaches. Your IT department may need to be trained in data recovery in preparation for disaster and loss situations, while your financial department may require training in fraud detection. Each job role has a particular faucet that requires a deeper level of training depending on the role. Taking the time to educate by department and/or job role will strengthen your safeguards.
Multimodality: Informing your employees of proper security policies and procedures comes down to getting their attention and making sure the messages stick. This can be tricky as all employees learn and listen slightly differently. Some of your employees may respond better to emails, videos or newsletters, while others may learn the ins and outs of security with hands-on, situation-based training. Your program will create the most awareness by distributing messages and need-to-know lessons through multiple mediums.
A disaster recovery plan: While your security awareness program may be thorough, deletion, accidental distribution, viruses and more will always pose some level of threat to your electronic data. Preparation for how to handle these incidents when they happen can keep them from turning into disasters. Give your employees the information they need to know who to go to, along with which steps to take if they need to report a problem, along with which personnel and organizations they may need to contact depending on the severity of the breach. Having a disaster recovery plan in place will help your organization bounce back quickly from security follies.
To start, all of your organization’s data should be backed up online, where it’s safe from natural disasters, hardware failure, and employee error. Online, offsite backup is a key element in any disaster recovery plan. With online backup in place, recent versions of your data will always be recoverable, no matter what threats your data has faced. Should your organization find its files have been encrypted by a virus, a major error has been detected in a recently changed file, or that an important document has been deleted, having an online backup will allow you to recover the data your organization needs, when you need it — and with little downtime.
Your organization can improve data security right now by educating your employees and by having cloud backup included in your disaster recovery plan. With the right preparations, you can limit security mishaps and have the ability to locate and retrieve the data you need, even in the event of a virus. With online backup, your employees will be able to confidently navigate any data disaster. Add online backup to your security awareness and recovery program today, and protect your company where it matters most.
