Norton recently performed a survey asking small businesses about cybersecurity threats. Less than one third of businesses understand what is required to protect their business from cybercriminals. This is not restricted to small businesses as a rash of attacks have occurred with large corporations in the past year, spreading customer data to hackers. To help counteract this, MDL Technology wants to go over ways to improve your small business data security.
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Create a Data Security Plan and Policy
Before you can get serious about data security, you need to have an action plan and use policy in place. There are a lot of things to cover in this plan, but the main points you need to cover are:
- What to do during security breach
- What data to access
- How to access that data
- Who can access the data
- A dump procedure
- How employees can use data
- What data requires encryption and authentication
Amp Up Data Encryption
For customer and client information, encryption is vital in your security settings. If your business has a data breach, you will lose customer trust. This can cripple a small business’ reputation and may even cause some customers to take legal action.
Institute Multi-Layered Security
Multi-layered security basically means not all people in your business should know the single password to access data. Instead, there should be individual login accounts for each employee that needs to access sensitive data. That sign in should not only have a complicated password, but additional personal information to enter before accessing data. In addition, every employee should not have access to the same data. Based on job roles, decide what information each employee should be able to access.
Backup Data
Backing up your data gives you peace of mind in case of a data wipe or data loss incident. You will be able to recover data in the event of disastrous data loss situations when you backup your data.
Train Employees on Data Security Policies and Procedures
Training employees on proper data security policies and procedures can do a lot of your legwork in preventing security breaches. Without realizing the risk, employees store business data on personal devices, use poor password practices, don’t backup data or open suspicious emails that bring viruses. Training on security safety will eliminate risk.
Move to the Cloud
With the amount of data breaches in the past couple of years, cloud computing is a safe and secure data storage open. Not only are there automatic data backup and remote wipe capabilities, but the cloud has all of the previous data security options plus it is not a piece of hardware that can be lost or stolen.
