5 Best Ways to Protect Your Company Data In 2022
Be Wary of Social Media
This goes beyond protecting company data and is good advice for everyone, really. Nobody is going to log onto Twitter or Facebook and knowingly post a big chunk of company data. However, it is easy to post little tidbits here and there and think nothing of it, but if someone wants to put in the legwork, they can piece all those tidbits together into a fairly revealing whole.
Not only is it important to watch what you post (and consider what it could potentially reveal), but you should vet your followers and curate them on a regular basis. (TitanFile)
Use Custom Software
There is nothing wrong with consumer off-the-shelf (COTS) software. There is plenty of trustworthy, strong, secure programs out there that companies rely on every day. However, the more widely-used a software solution is, the bigger bullseye it becomes for hackers. The logic is simple: if they can find a way into this software, they can find a way into every business that uses this software.
If you invest in custom software for your company, it will not necessarily be any stronger or more effective than COTS software, but it will present a much smaller target. Hackers can put in the work to get your data, or they can put in the same work to get the data of the dozens or hundreds of companies that use a piece of COTS software. (Forbes)
Consider the Dangers of Remote Work
With the COVID-19 pandemic still raging, 2021 was the year of working remotely, even more so than the year before it. This means a lot of employees must access corporate servers and networks from home using their personal devices. This presents a bigger risk to security than if everyone was using in-house hardware.
The solution isn’t to bring everyone back to the office. The work-from-home model is here to stay, which means IT security needs to adapt to this new environment and your company needs to lay down serious rules and regulations involving at-home network access. There is a myriad of benefits to remote work, but it does present new challenges, and those challenges need to be addressed. (StartUp Nation)
Segment Your Business Network
Compartmentalization is used across a variety of industries that deal with sensitive information. If one segment of a network is compromised, be it an IT network or a network of people, it won’t bring down the entire network because it’s walled off from everyone else. This is an especially useful practice when it comes to the above bit of advice about remote work.
It’s always a good practice to prepare for the worst. In this case, the worst would be a network breach. If the part of the network that was breached is segmented, then only that segment has been exposed. They can’t then use the door they opened to work their way through your entire system. (Secude)
Eliminate Unnecessary Information
Some companies have a bad habit of storing information that does not need to be stored, so that the only thing it is doing is giving hackers more data to access. If it does not need to be collected, do not collect it. This goes especially for your customers’ private data.
The more data you squirrel away, the more security you need in place to keep it safe. The simplest way to keep it out of the hands of hackers is to not have it sitting on a server in the first place. If you do not need it, do away with it. This way, if the worst-case scenario happens and you experience a data breach, the damage will not be any worse than it needs to be. If you are exposing customer information that is not necessary for your business practices, there are going to be questions. (Business)
