Now more than ever, it is extremely important to ensure that your company’s data is secure and protected. With increasing news stories of businesses losing all of their data and being hacked, it is a good idea to look at your security policies and ensure you are doing all of the right things to keep your data safe.
We have put together a few useful tips to help you understand how to protect your company’s data:
Define what needs to be protected
The first port of call to ensuring you are protecting all of the correct company data is to undertake an internal audit to determine what exactly needs covering in your business.
Once you have done this, you can establish the right type of protection for the different areas and be confident they have been adequately dealt with.
Encrypt your data
Encrypting your data is a sure fire way to ensure that, on the off chance your computers are hacked, hackers won’t be able to use your data. This is because encryption converts any data into code, making it unreadable even if hackers access it.
It is a good idea to encrypt not only computers but any hard drives, USB’s and all other devices that store your data.
Strong passwords
One of the main ways that data is hacked is because of easy to guess passwords. Using simple passwords such as ‘12345’, ‘password’ or featuring your company’s name is an absolute no go. Choose passwords that have a mixture of letters, numbers and symbols but don’t relate to you or your company in any way.
Further to this don’t use the same password for everything, make sure you choose something different for every program that needs a password. There are programs that can be used to generate random, strong passwords that will ensure stronger protection for your data.
Writing passwords down for anyone to find is also dangerous. It is understandable that most businesses won’t be able to remember passwords for every program being used so if you do have to write them down, make sure that the document containing them is stored securely and encrypted.
Antivirus software
Investing in a good antivirus and antimalware software is essential for keeping data safe. As well as severely reducing the risk of attack from viruses such as malware and spyware, antivirus software can reduce the amount of spam emails received – with most viruses transmitted via email this is vital to protecting your company.
Restricted access
Another way to reduce the risk of any data breaches is to restrict the access of important documents to only team members who need the information or those who are higher up in the company. This minimises the risk of any attack as there are less people with access and therefore less chance of people clicking on or downloading something harmful. It also means that if any hackers do get into your system, they have a lower chance of finding the data as there are less devices holding it.
Training
Train and educate staff members on the importance of online security and data protection to ensure they understand the risks and consequences of any hacks or data breaches.
Further to this, train them to understand what they are looking for when it comes to spam emails and phishing attacks and minimise the risk of them actually clicking on and downloading harmful viruses.
Backups and failsafes
Create regular backups of data to ensure that, in the unlikely case that your data is hacked or lost, you have an up-to-date copy.
If you lose your data and don’t have a backup in place, this does not mean the end of the world. There are ways that data can be extracted and recovered – but there is no guarantee that this is an option, so it is always best to give yourself a headstart with regular backups.
Cover your business
Here at Woodstock IT, our highly skilled professional team can help you and your business ensure it is protecting its data properly and effectively. If you would like a free, no obligation quote or even just a chat about our services, call us on 01403 290321.
