Data breaches can be disastrous businesses, and chances are several that made nationwide headlines within the past few years still stand out in your memory. These were cybercrimes involving hackers, phishing scams, DDoS attacks, and other online methods that keep even seasoned IT professionals awake at night.
Digital information security breaches are certainly no joke, but the ease with which they can occur can be a bit overstated – especially if business owners take some relatively basic steps to secure sensitive information. While it may have been true 20 or even 10 years ago that your information wasn’t safe online, things have definitely changed since then, particularly concerning cloud storage security.
Read below to see what you can do to protect your company against an online data breach.
Educate & Train Your Employees
It’s vital for any company to train its employees on data security issues. Phishing scams have been around for decades, and they can be just as effective now as they were way back when. This is because they have less to do with tricking your system than they do with tricking your employees.
Phishing scams involve someone posing as a well-known individual or institution online and seeking sensitive information from someone else via email. Scammers can pose as your company’s executives or supervisors, potentially tricking lower-level employees into giving up critical information, including log-in credentials that permit access to sensitive information.
Phishing scams aren’t the extent to how employees need to be trained, but they underline the importance of understanding that data breaches aren’t always as high-tech as you’d think.
Establish & Maintain Procedures
Your company should have a clear data security plan. Having a plan is useless, though, if you aren’t enforcing it or updating it over time. Doing so will not only help you keep your data secure, but demonstrate to your employees that you take data security seriously and that they should, too.
24/7 Monitoring
Whether you contract with an outside IT company or have a team of your own, use them to your full advantage. That means tasking them with 24/7 surveillance of your company’s systems and networks to spot attempts to breach your system or actual breaches almost as soon as they occur.
Destroy Unnecessary Paper Files
As with phishing scams, sometimes low-tech means of getting one’s hands on sensitive information are the most effective. Someone snooping around your storage room or filing cabinets can steal important paperwork with your clients’ or employees’ personally identifiable information (PII). Ironically, these kinds of data breaches don’t leave much of a paper trail at all.
If you still have unnecessary paper documents laying around, it’s time to consider shredding them. If you haven’t destroyed these documents already because you fear losing the information on them would be detrimental, you can digitize them for secure storage in the cloud. This is a win-win scenario, where you can protect important information and free up office space all in one.