Businesses these days are under a great threat of cybersecurity breaches and data theft. Irrespective of your business’ size and scale, you are prone to becoming a target and hence need to protect your systems at all cost. Not only can a data breach possibly leak confidential company information, it can also harm your reputation, your company’s brand image, and make you lose your customer’s trust as their information would also be at stake. Hence, in order to protect your company from a cyber security threat, follow the below listed tips to keep your company and its data safe:
Regularly install software updates
In order to keep your device safe and on its peak performance, you should ensure that all installed software is up-to-date. This is crucial to ensure whether your devices are still supported by the manufacturers of the software you use or not, and hence indicate if you need to upgrade your devices. As soon as a new update is available you should install it in your device as updates do not only feature new fixes, they also fix any security vulnerabilities that may have been identified.
Use two-factor authentication
Two-factor authentication is the most basic and effective strategy you can adopt to keep your systems safe. Two-factor authentication essentially means that in order to login to their systems, your employees would have to provide additional proof of their identity in addition to their username and password. It can be implemented on both employee facing and customer facing systems, and helps secure your employees against any phishing attacks, credential misuse and data theft.
Backup data on a regular basis
It is important that you backup your data on a regular basis in order to keep it safe and maintain a record. If your systems get compromised in any way, you need to ensure that you have a complete record of all your transactions and customer interactions in order to function your company on a usual basis. The data backed up should include staff information, customer information, employee logs, financial, operations data and any pertaining documentation.
Set up logs
It is important that your company sets up logs in order to track a breach or a cyber security incident. Logging can help you identify any potential threats early on and companies should maintain logs of failed login attempts, successful login attempts, changes to login and password details, denied two-factor authentication requests, and malware notifications or potential threats. Any unusual activity in a certain account should be followed by an email to that account and its posted backup.
Have protocol for security breaches
In case you do incur a security breach, make sure that you have a plan in mind. Companies should prepare to prevent security breaches but should also have a protocol in mind in case something goes wrong. This involves creating a list of things or accounts that are potentially under threat, incident response guide, and an in-house or professional team to investigate and take action on an incident response breach.
Take great care in choosing cloud based services
Companies these days avail cloud based services as it ensures them the ease of working from anywhere they want. While there exist a lot of cloud based services, companies should take great care and only opt for the most reputed and renowned cloud providers to ensure that their company data remains safe in case of a breach.
Secure your devices and your network
In order to protect your devices and network, you should secure your devices by enabling anti-malware software. This prevents malware, ransomware and viruses from entering your system and helps you avoid some of the associated risk of a data breach.
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