How to keep your Business Data Safe

The safety of the data you generate in your company has a role to play in the success of your business. The people involved with your organization, whether customers, employees or investors, trust you to safeguard their information at all costs. A data breach can cause tremendous harm to a business, sometimes even permanently crippling it. Here is a breakdown of several things you need to do to keep your business data safe:

Restrict access

To as far as you are concerned, you are not operating your business alone. Different people come in and out of your organization every day. While you may trust your employees to handle data with care, human error is the leading cause of data breaches. Put measures to restrict access. Not everyone should have access to every piece of information. The employee log in passes and authorization codes should help you get it done.

In restricting access, employ the principle of minimum privilege, which is all about allowing people to access only the information they need in accomplishing their designated tasks. For example, anyone in the finance department should not have access to data from the communication department, unless it is useful for the execution of their duties. Introduce the Identity and Access Management (IAM), and the Single Sign-On (SSO) technology in your company. This will help with identity mapping, and controlling who is accessing which data at what time of the day.

Backup your data

If you have not performed your mysql server backup to this point, you are lagging. Technically, backing up your data preserves your information in preparation for an attack that might cause a data breach. The duplicated pieces of information can either be onsite or offsite, although it helps to have them on both. They act as your strategy to survive the data breach. With a backup plan, you can rest assured that any threat in your security cannot render all your information deleted or inaccessible.

Pro tip: when considering a cloud backup service provider, audit them. Any third party you involve in your business needs to be thoroughly audited – as a security precaution.

Passwords

Passwords are the most commonly used form of security by companies. Rightfully so, you can control who accesses your accounts and files with passwords. The secret is to ensure your passwords are complex to make it harder for hackers to crack. Further, keep your passwords long enough, with a mix of characters, ranging from numbers and alphabets to symbols. Ensure that you do not choose the same passwords for all your accounts, or even use common dictionary words as passphrases. Do not shy away from using password management tools to help in storing your password. Examples include LastPass, Zoho Vault, Dashline 4, and Sticky Password Premium.

Encrypt your data

Other than passwords, you can determine another code to secure your information further. The encryption codes should also be complex, and far much different from the passwords you create. The good thing with encryption is that you must decrypt a file before you can open it, even just to see the content thereof.

Train your employees

Human beings are the biggest reason for security threats all over the world. While you have other strategies to combat any hacker attempts, you need to focus some attention on your employees. Some basics of data security and management go a long way in the safety of your business’s data. For one, they need to know all about data backup strategies, and how to upload and download information from the cloud. Some other basic lessons on expected network security practices include public file-sharing guidelines, password management, rebooting of devices, downloading files from the internet, among others.

While at it, create an employee-exit policy. When people resign and leave your company, they should not be in possession of any property of the company, including name tags and pass logs.