This is contributed by Jason Dirkham.
The most valuable companies in the world are all data businesses. These companies take in information and use it to control the digital landscape. As such, it is their most valuable asset.
The same is true of conventional companies. While physical assets, staff and money might seem like the lifeblood of the business, the reality is that data is still the most essential element, and something that everyone should be protecting.
Of course, not all firms are actually paying a great deal of attention to their data. Even if they know where it is, they don’t understand the economic or strategic importance it represents. Many believe that their existing solutions, such as firewalls or cloud services, provide them with all the protection they need to stay safe, but that’s rarely the case.
The purpose of this post is to help you determine whether your data protection is a fortress or a sitting duck. You’ll learn about the nuanced processes involved in protecting data and whether your organization is doing enough to ensure that third parties don’t take it and use it for their nefarious purposes.
Check Your Vulnerabilities
The first step to determine the strength of your business data protection is to do a security vulnerability audit. This exercise highlights areas where your defenses might be less than you’d hope.
When performing this audit, ensure that you use qualified security professionals who understand how it works. You want people who can probe your systems like bad actors would and find problems with your existing approach.
Ultimately, you want to avoid complacency. Ethical hackers can often uncover problems with your defenses quickly and notify you of changes you need to implement to boost your security.
Check Your Data Security Policy
It’s also a good idea to check your data security policy to ensure that it falls in line with best practice. You need an approach that can accommodate today’s threats, not those from last year.
Remember that the digital security environment changes on the time-scale of hours, not weeks. Therefore, having a flexible security policy helps to absorb changes in the security environment.
Pay particular attention to your handling of sensitive data. Look at the current systems you have in place to defend against a breach and what you could do to prevent problems from emerging in the future. If necessary, hire data security experts temporarily to implement changes to your existing approach to make it more defensible in the event of a concerted attack.
Check Your Employee Training
Another thing you’ll want to consider is the degree of employee training you are implementing. Workers at your firm should understand the value of your business data and the simple actions they can take to protect it.
For instance, colleagues should understand that they should never provide solicited information via email to anyone without verifying the authenticity of the sender first. Phishing attacks often involve criminals collecting security information from nearly identical email addresses that dupe recipients.
You also want your administrators to be up to speed on the tactics that criminals use to obtain company information. Having a talented group of people who can manage your network is a great way to protect your interests and ensure that you don’t unwittingly damage your brand because of a breach.
Check Your Solutions
Your business data could also be a sitting duck if you are using the wrong DLP solution. Many vendors claim they offer comprehensive protection, but they are still quite far behind (including many of the big names).
For example, services may lack data protection feature breadth. Companies might not offer things like cloud backups, fingerprinting, and native remediation. They might also be lacking in the comprehensiveness of their data protection. For instance, vendors could lack a single console, unified policy enforcement and off-network measures.
Even basic behavioral awareness might be missing from your current solution. Systems might not be able to detect unusual activities and be unable to adapt to clear attempts at breaching your systems.
Check Your Passwords And Encryption
While it might sound basic, your passwords and encryption might also be harming your ability to protect your business data. Systems that lack strength are easy to overcome, especially by hackers with databases of candidate passwords ready to go.
While passwords are a strong deterrent, they are not perfect. Business employees often use passwords associated with their regular consumer life, and these might not be as strong as you would like. What’s more, they often lack the same incentives to protect business property as they do their own, especially if they are a part of a larger organization.
Therefore, ensure your admin team enforces a strong password policy. Get people to include random strings of letters and numbers in their passcodes to prevent hackers from generating correct entries from their logs.
Furthermore, encrypt all communication between servers and endpoints. Ensures that traffic is invisible to anyone monitoring your network from the outside.
Check Your Software
You can also determine whether your enterprise data is robust or a sitting duck by checking your software. Keeping it up to date and patching vulnerabilities can help you prevent hackers from accessing your data and causing harm.
Software goes out of date as soon as a hacker uncovers a vulnerability in a system. From that moment onward, continuing to use software is risky.
That’s why it is so critical to download updates immediately. If you have a large network, you can get admin to perform the update overnight or on a simulated system and then transfer it to your live network at the earliest possible time. You should have systems in place that make it simple to apply patches, even if they don’t coincide with your IT maintenance schedule.
Check Your Data Backups
Finally, double-check your data backups. Ensure that you distribute information widely such that a single attack can’t undermine your security. Even if hackers ransom your information, you have nearly-new data you can fall back on to continue your operations.
