When you’re responsible for important data like financial and medical records or private consumer information, you want to make sure you have the strongest defenses against security breaches. One compromise can seriously damage your business’s hard-earned reputation. Luckily, strengthening your enterprise data security measures isn’t difficult. In fact, you may be implementing many of these practices already. Focus on these key areas and encourage safe online habits to strengthen your enterprise data security measures and protect your small business from cyber attacks.
1. Educate your employees.
Data breaches can happen right under your nose, often because of your internal team. Educating your employees about safe online practices is your business’s best defense against this. Your employees should understand how vitally important your small business’s data is, how it can be compromised, and all of the measures they should follow to protect it. It can be difficult to protect users from themselves sometimes, but knowledge is power and educating your employees will help. Encourage these internal improvements among your employees:
- Stress email safety best practices. Make sure your employees are paying attention to where their emails are coming from. Any inbox message they open should be from a trusted sender, and only expected links or email attachments should be clicked on/downloaded. Make sure your employees know that if they have any doubts, the safest thing to do is not click. Immediately hard delete (not just move to “trash,” but completely delete) any email from an unknown sender with an attachment or suspicious link, and do not ever open it! Your employees should also be wary of emails from senders they do recognize. An associate’s email could be hacked, and your employee might open an email or click on a link thinking it’s harmless when it’s not. Luckily, most email providers will alert your employees when an email looks suspicious. Bottomline: If it looks suspicious, do not click it!
- Teach web browsing basics. Suspicious links and sites also apply to browsing the web — always instruct your employees to pay attention to the warnings in Internet browsers so that they refrain from visiting any malicious websites. Each new site or software comes with its own set of security vulnerabilities, so educate your employees on how to identify reputable websites or brands and warning signs of a sketchy site.
- Enforce strong passwords. Provide your employees with tips on how to create strong passwords — the easiest and quickest way to strengthen your enterprise data security. When creating new, safe passwords remember to never use birthdates, names of spouses, children, pets, or any or personal data that can be easily discovered. A strong password uses a combination of capital and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols to create passphrases that are harder for malicious software to crack. For example, N0rd!cB@CKup is a passphrase that uses symbols and numbers instead of letters to create words that the malware won’t be looking for, but is still easy to remember. There are also Password Manager Tools that will create strong passwords for your logins and keep them safely stored in a vault for when you need to use them. These programs can improve login security and decrease forgotten password issues among employees. Another password rule to live by: make sure each employee has their own username and password for any login system and never share or write down passwords.
2. Utilize a multi-layered security system.
Install, configure, and maintain an advanced endpoint security solution for your entire small business network and all devices. This includes a detection system for intrusions, behavior-blocking components, and automatic monitoring for actions typically initiated by malware. Make sure software restriction policies only allow specific applications to run to reduce risk of infection.Your multi-layer security system should also include;
- Have a strong firewall. In order to properly protect your network, you need to have a strong firewall — most computers come equipped with one. Firewalls protect your small business network by controlling Internet traffic flowing in and out of each device. Any major brand of firewall protection should be installed and updated often. A firewall blocks all incoming connections and includes security capabilities like intrusion prevention, content and URL filtering, and encrypted traffic inspection to prevent attacks and anything unauthorized on your network. Also, make sure programs and users have the lowest level of privileges necessary to complete tasks and perform updates so an administrator (like you) can confirm each update’s need and legitimacy.
- Keep an up-to-date superior antivirus software. Antivirus and anti-malware software are essential — they’re your safeguard if an unwanted attack succeeds in making its way through the rest of your security measures. To ensure their effectiveness, keep all security software regularly paid for and updated so lapses in coverage don’t result in a compromise. Once you have airtight enterprise data security, you want to make sure you’re maintaining it and updating it correctly for full protection.
- Secure portable electronics. Because laptops and mobile devices are portable, they’re considered high risk for being lost or stolen. Make sure you take extra steps to ensure any portable device containing sensitive business data are protected. First, download a reputable encryption software for every employee’s laptop. An encryption software will make any information on the device unreadable to anyone without the encryption key needed to unlock the data. Without the correct password, it can’t be read. At a bare minimum, you should password-protect all devices containing company data, and enable remote wiping, to prevent unauthorized access. Ensure all devices are backed up onto a secure cloud routinely before enabling remote wiping, but in a crisis, completely wiping a lost laptop or stolen phone will safeguard any information on the device.
3. Monitor your entire system and its assets routinely.
Those little software notices, reminders and updates that pop up? Don’t ignore them! If you aren’t paying attention, you could miss a critical security update or an important clue to a potential security breach. If you don’t monitor your entire system regularly, you won’t know you’ve been compromised until the damage has already been done.
- Make sure all software is up to date. Outdated software is open to vulnerabilities that can be taken advantage of by ransomware. This seemingly small slip could corrupt a device’s entire system. Make sure all systems and software are up to date with relevant patches, especially browser plugins like Flash Player, Java, and Adobe Reader. Turn on update reminders for all security and Internet-based software and encourage employees to update as soon as the reminder pops up.
- Backup regularly and often. None of these security measures work nearly as effectively if you aren’t backing up your data regularly. Don’t rely on your employees to manually backup external hard drives and devices — that’s how accidents happen and data gets lost. To ensure all your data is stored safely, install an automatic, continuous cloud backup software with previous file version retention lengths of 60 days or more. This type of backup program will update your backup as changes are made to ensure nothing is ever lost or deleted, and it’s the only safety net your business has when a cryptovirus strikes. Viruses can be sneaky and may go undetected for months if you’re not diligent in monitoring recently changed files. Because of this, an online backup plan that retains your previous file versions for 60 days or more is the only true data recovery solution your organization has against ransomware. A good backup provider will send you backup reports to show you which files were recently changed, and therefore backed up. When your backup report looks suspicious (more files being changed/backed up than usual), it’s often the first indicator that you have a virus. Pay attention to these reports so you don’t miss this early virus detection notice. if you do notice suspicious activity, you’ll be able to recover the data you need by restoring previous file versions. Additionally, you want to make sure your data is secure at all times, even when moving across networks and to other devices, and isn’t readable to unauthorized users. To effectively protect data from the inside out, ensure your enterprise data protection strategy includes end-to-end encryption across all databases, applications, networks, and endpoint devices.
- Have cloud-based disaster recovery in place. A good cloud backup will offer cloud based disaster recovery features that help small businesses stay ahead of crises like human error, malware infection, or weather-related natural disasters. Your cloud backup software should allow you to restore any data you need remotely, from anywhere with an internet connection. It should also allow you to recover previous versions of encrypted files, so you can reboot your system to a known clean state (a critical feature should your company ever be struck with a virus that encrypts your data).
- Use a data-leakage prevention software. Look into specific software for data-leakage prevention, set up at key network touch points to look for crucial information coming out of your internal network — things like credit card numbers, bits of financial information, or pieces of code that would indicate a breach. Good software packages let you monitor how your data is being used, where it’s stored, and protect it from being leaked or stolen with complete storage visibility for cloud and email. Make sure the security and data loss prevention is extended to include cloud environments and multiple mobile devices, beyond your own network.
Data backup is a critical tool that should be a part of any enterprise data security plan. Security measures fail, and when they do, cloud backup can minimize company downtime by helping businesses recover the data they’ve lost and need to get back immediately to resume normal day-to-day operations. While backup can’t prevent security mishaps, it’s the ultimate safety net for the retrievability of your data. Try Nordic Backup FREE for 3 months with no worries and no credit card needed!
