These days, businesses across the world are practically wired to the internet. This connectivity makes doing business with customers in different parts of the globe convenient and extremely quick. With a few clicks of the mouse, customers can browse products, pick the ones they need, pay for them wirelessly, and then have them delivered to their homes. However, such convenience doesn’t come without a price.
For example, a quick glimpse into this list will reveal that many of the world’s biggest and most damaging data breaches in history involved businesses. These data breaches involved leaked personal passwords, user information, and other sensitive data of both users/clients and businesses. Such monumental mix-ups often lead to loss of confidence and then rapid declines in revenue for the victim companies.
If you don’t want your business to suffer from such a modern form of theft, here are six inexpensive data protection tips you should follow:
Invest in a feature-rich data backup and restoration tool.
Aside from hacking, your business data can also get lost or compromised due to accidental or targeted deletion. If your business model relies heavily on the availability of data, then a single day of not accessing them can cause serious damage to your company.
Fortunately, you can simply get a backup and restoration tool that can safeguard your precious data from potential loss. For example, you can get a feature-packed Microsoft Office 365 backup and restore tool to easily safeguard your Office 365 emails against loss due to targeted attack, technical malfunction, and human error. There are other similar tools that you can get depending on your business requirement but the idea is the same.
Encrypt your data.
Encryption works as a mask that hides your data’s actual meaning or content into a form of code that would make it difficult for an unauthorized person to crack without the necessary decryption tool or information.
For many years, government agencies, military organizations, and businesses have been encrypting their data to protect them should they fall into the wrong hands. In the majority of cases, encrypted data is practically safe; however, a highly-skilled, well-equipped, and determined individual could, theoretically, crack the encryption. But, all things considered, encryption is still an excellent data protection tool that helps buy you time as you find ways to stop an attack on your encrypted data that’s being broken into by somebody.
Don’t neglect those system updates.
Many unsuspecting business owners tend to ignore prompts for system updates on their company’s computers, only to regret it later when their data have been compromised due to vulnerabilities in their operating system.
Keep in mind that tech companies that sell computer software and operating systems won’t require updates just for fun. Instead, they prompt end-users to install those updates to patch certain loopholes that hackers could exploit to steal sensitive data. As such, be sure to always allow for those update prompts no matter how inconvenient they may seem to you.
Install firewalls and content filters.
These two are inexpensive data protection safeguards that can work wonders for your business. A firewall acts as a virtual between your sensitive data and anyone connected to the internet who attempts to enter your system to steal information stored in your computers and company network. Content filters, meanwhile, prevent access to certain sites that can harm your computer system and cause a devastating data breach.
Firewalls and content filters cost practically nothing (except a physical firewall), so you should get them up and running soon to safeguard your business data.
Educate all employees about digital security.
There have been plenty of cases when data breaches occurred because of employee error: either due to a weak or stolen password or because an official company email was accessed in an unsecured computer network. These are all preventable mistakes, but only if the employees were oriented on the dangers of data breaches and the appropriate ways to prevent them.
With this, you should make it your company’s policy to include digital security orientation in your onboarding and professional development programs. This simple trick will help prevent human-induced cybersecurity problems that could potentially bring your business to its knees.
Sanitize all computer hardware.
This means scanning thumb drives for viruses and installing strong anti-virus software on all personal computers. Additionally, you should constantly run system scans to get rid of malware and other harmful programs that could compromise both the data stored in the computers and the data accessed via the company network.
Securing your business’ critical and sensitive data need not be expensive. With these cost-efficient techniques, you should safeguard your company data easily and economically.