Ways to Help Prevent Data Theft
If you pay any attention to tech news these days, you’ll see story upon story about hackers, leaked passwords and data theft. With the increased portability of data–laptops, smartphones, tablets and flash drives with large capacities–and the emerging popularity of cloud services that store your data on computers you don’t control, the less naive you can afford to be about your business’s sensitive data.
And yet, for many businesses, ignorance is bliss. If your business still allows employees to use the same password everywhere, skimps on proper IT and network security, doesn’t have proper technology policies in place or doesn’t backup your data regularly, then it’s time to pay attention–before disaster strikes.
Here are a few easy things your business should implement right away:
- Secure your network. We talked about securing your WIFI network earlier, so start there. Does your office intranet require unique usernames and passwords for every user? If not, now’s the time to do it.
- Enforce proper password management. Put proper policies in place that require your employees to change their passwords regularly. (Note: They should also be require to use good passwords too.)
- Use VPN when traveling. Don’t use public WIFI whenever possible.
- Encrypt your data. Encryption is so easy nowadays that it should be a requirement for all devices that leave the office, such as laptops and flash drives.
- Secure your backups. What good is having data security precautions in place if someone can walk into your office steal your backups? While you’re at it, lock up that server room as well. Other than your IT department, access to your servers should be limited to a need-to-know basis only.
- Stay up-to-date. A lot of times, software updates are critical to your company’s security–from antivirus definition updates to security patches. If you don’t know which updates fix critical security holes or bugs, then make sure you have an IT team that can.
While this list is not by any means comprehensive, these are just a few simple things you can do in your company right away that will greatly reduce your risk of data theft.
If you don’t have an IT support team in place that can help you implement network security in these areas, contact OAC Technology, a Minneapolis-based IT support company, today to schedule a free Network Security Audit for your business.
