how to protect data: How to ensure strong data protection? Here are some tips
With data at the core of your business operations, with the increasing threats posed by cybercriminal activity around the world, you need to pay more attention than ever to protecting that data. While these realities have fueled the development of cybersecurity solutions, cybercriminals have simultaneously found new ways to exploit gaps in defense mechanisms focused on protecting corporate assets.
Despite the numerous types of cyberattacks that organizations may face, the majority of cybercriminals use a handful of methods for which the following measures and strategies can help you improve security, reduce risk, and provide a quick response to potential incidents encourage data breaches.
Create a company-wide security mindset
Everyone has a role in data security; It is not simply the responsibility of the information security or IT team, but rather a conscious effort across the organization to support more secure practices. Develop security champions into key teams where critical security objectives need to be met. Individuals with the time, freedom, and accountability for these responsibilities can help change the narrative of the security department telling them what to do, instead making them part of the resolution process.
Conduct comprehensive and regular audits
Successful cyber attacks often result from exploiting old and unforgotten software vulnerabilities that have never been updated. While headlines focus on zero-day vulnerabilities, it’s often those that have been known for months to years that are far more common. This is especially true when the application is being built by smaller teams that cannot properly manage their systems.
Having teams take care of maintaining and provisioning the systems will help reduce the likelihood of vulnerabilities and pay off accumulated technical debt. As a check and balance, a routine audit is a realistic strategy that allows organizations to find weaknesses where requirements may not have been known or as a result of acting quickly to meet a deadline. To be successful, organizations must regularly conduct thorough audits of critical systems to improve security posture and mitigate potential risks.
Back up data regularly
Backups are essential for data security. Important files and information must be protected from data loss situations by taking frequent data backup based on your data loss tolerance. With reliable backups, you can withstand common events like system crashes, hard drive failures, corruption and ransomware scenarios. Regular backups can recover up to 100% of files with little to no effort, saving you downtime and recovering from any business interruption. Cyber criminals have become very adept at identifying where backups are stored and deleting them during ransomware attacks. So pay special attention to how they are protected, store them in external locations and make sure they are securely managed.
Strong identity management
In 2022, using stolen usernames and passwords is still at the top of the list of attacks against businesses. Organizations should invest in a single corporate identity to tie disparate systems into a unified account. The benefit allows for centralized management and, at the first sign of compromise, a place to suspend or reset the employee’s account. If unified access isn’t possible, the best way to protect yourself from these attacks is to use a password manager like 1Password or Last Pass to keep track of all your password combinations and use the password generation feature. This ensures that your passwords are secure and unique across all your devices and accounts. Finally, use multi-factor authentication to further secure your accounts and limit the impact of stolen credentials.
Protect the remote workforce
In today’s modern workplace, many employees use a mix of corporate and personal devices. Securing your employees and their devices shouldn’t be an afterthought, and it’s an area where the right investment can boost productivity. Ensuring the basics like disk encryption, patch management, and strong endpoint security solutions not only protects data on the device, but also increases visibility of an attack. The business will benefit by ensuring systems are kept up to date, secure and working well, and employees will benefit from a smoother experience.
Summarize
With today’s rapid increase in cybersecurity risks, it’s critical to be prepared with the necessary security tools and process improvements to protect your organization’s most valuable asset – its data.
From the very beginning, it is imperative for organizations to carefully list the weak points of their IT stack, particularly their database. While the enterprise application servers are an important asset for testing, database security and ensuring it is patched and configured is equally important. Open source databases like PostgreSQL have strong community support, with quarterly security and bug fixes and hundreds of community members publicly reviewing the code. Enterprises can also benefit from support options to offset any operational burden for teams of any size.
Internally, it’s important to remember that every member of an organization is a vital line of defense against security breaches. Because every employee has a responsibility to protect company data, teaching them how to effectively recognize and report the early signs of a potential incident can make all the difference.
Keep these measures in mind and develop a security strategy that involves team members from across the organization. Success requires an ongoing approach to engaging employees, identifying risk and taking action, but the rewards come from keeping your data safe and the continued success of your business.
(The author is CISO at EnterpriseDB)