The secret weapon of every company is its data. It includes information related to clients, suppliers, customers, transactions, and much more. Using this information, a company makes its plans. Losing any of this data can cause damage that is impossible to anticipate.
As per Statista’s report, the number of data breaches has been rising continuously since 2005. In fact, in the year 2018, the loss of 446.5 million dollars was reported as an all-time high with 1,244 cases of information theft.
With such a high number of cases, protecting corporate data becomes a priority. But, the question is- what techniques can you use to protect the confidential information of the company? Scroll down to find out!
Keep separate business and personal email accounts.
Do not make the mistake of using your personal email account for business purposes. Generally, people set “easy-to-remember” passwords for their personal accounts. It is very easy to crack such passwords for hackers, leading to the leakage of any crucial corporate information.
Moreover, whenever you are mailing any confidential information, make sure to encrypt it. End-to-end encryption uses public keys to ensure the content of the mail stays only between sender and receiver. It can only be decrypted by the private key, which only the receiver has access to. So, eliminating the chance of data breach.
Shred the unwanted digital files.
A data that may not be useful for you might be helpful for your competitor or any other person. The possibility is that your competitor uses it against you. Moreover, just deleting the data from the system or hard drive is not enough. It can be recovered easily. Therefore, you need to shred all unwanted digital files to protect the company from identity theft.
Shredding will make the data unreadable and unusable. If you are interested in unveiling more benefits of shredding, you can read more here. It will help you understand how you can safely and completely eliminate the old unnecessary files.
Educate your employees about cybersecurity
Your employees use company systems and have access to some information related to the organization’s operations. Therefore, it is essential to educate them about cybersecurity. You can start a training program where you can tell them:
- How to encrypt the data
- How to set strong passwords and use two-step authentication
- How to create backups or store the information on the cloud
- How to stop unwanted downloads to avoid malware
Training about all these things can restrict the information leak to a great extend. In addition to this, you can also limit employees’ access to certain websites so that they stay focused on their work.
Refer to FINRA checklist
FINRA (The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) has issued a checklist to safeguard businesses from rising cybercrimes. You can find the list on their website and use it to improve the existing cybersecurity of your company. It will also help you plan the regulatory measures to mitigate the chances of the data breach.
The bottom line
Being a victim of a data breach is not less than any nightmare for the organization. However, you can protect your company from this by training, encryption, and shredding of data.
