A New Year Means New Threats to Data Security

The past year has been an eventful one in the world of data security, and 2018 promises to be another one for the records. To protect your organization, you need to make data security a top priority. That involves maximizing your resources, getting strategic with your digital security, and knowing where your vulnerabilities lie. Here are 3 things you can do to maximize your data security in 2018.  

Improve Your Passwords

Bad passwords are still seen as the biggest vulnerability for corporate digital security. And it’s easy enough to up your game that you’ll only have yourself to blame if you don’t. The secret to creating a really great password is to use ones that are easy to remember but hard to guess. Use phrases instead of words. Don’t use the same password for personal and professional accounts. And make sure your team knows the benefits of using a password manager. The worst thing employers can do is fail to provide actionable guidance on using strong passwords. Make sure your staff knows that a lot depends on their ability to create and maintain effective passwords and therefore a strong first digital line of defense.

Focus on Identity and Access Management

As you trust your employees with critical business and client data, it’s important to make sure you have certain guardrails that ensure users are who they say they are. You need to be triply sure that their access is protected. A vast amount of data actually exists outside of your corporate firewall – on mobile phones, laptops, social media, or websites. Be sure you are protecting that data as well as your intranet through restricting device use to only approved users. This can be done through single sign on authentication, multi-factor authentication, and any number of new access management tools that are proving their value every day in the corporate world. Consider even implementing software-defined perimeters that help control access to mobile data, and can flag any unusual behavior. It could be the very thing that stops a hacker in their tracks.

Get Serious About Incident Response

It’s all but inevitable that your company will experience a security breach at some point in the future, if you have not already been on the receiving end of a cyber-crime. Things go wrong, and the most important thing to help prepare is to have a thorough incident response plan in place. Your team should know what to expect should the worst happen. That means getting a plan written down and communicated across your business. Training is important as are drills, similar to fire or earthquake preparation. Your team should be prepared to act instinctively should the company suffer a data breach. The plan itself should be developed by a cross-business unit team to provide insight into all aspects of the business should a data breach occur. While it might seem like a heavy investment of time and resources on the front end, a proper incident response plan can save you a substantial amount of money.

For more tips on how to keep your data safe this year, connect with the document management experts at Happy Faces Records Management today!

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