Data breaches are among the major risks that businesses face in this day and age. We have seen businesses becoming crippled due to data breaches. Organizations, both big and small are not safe from data hacks. Every business has a responsibility to ensure that private information about their clients and customers remains secure at all times. That is vital to the health of your business.
Many businesses are not well-prepared for any kind of action that hackers use to get access to data from their information systems. Also, many businesses, especially small businesses don’t know how to deal with any kind of hacking.
However, data security in any organization can be improved through new methods. Businesses need to invest in the best enterprise VMware backup solution to not only keep their business protected, but also increase their customer service and brand reputation. We have put together the top tips to improving enterprise data protection. Keep reading to discover more.
Why you need the top tips to improving enterprise data protection
Data security is vital for every business, especially those that lack the knowledge and resources to deal with the issue when a data breach happens.
Whatever the type of data breach that can occur in your business, you can potentially face severer consequences such as downtime and huge legal fees. Therefore, every business must invest in data security mechanisms and the best enterprise VMware backup solution to protect your data against threats.
Every business is committed to offering trustful services to their clients. Clients trust you with private information with every purchase. This means data leak could certainly impact your business reputation. A data breach can potentially keep your clients at risk, and thus, the future of your business.
Businesses are held legally responsible for the theft of information. However, some businesses do not consider the harmful effects data breach can have on their company. Thus, they fail to invest in data security and other required security mechanisms.
There’s a lot at stake when a data breach occurs. A lot of money is involved including the cost of a fine, loss of employee productive time and additional expenses for necessary steps to resolve the issue and ensure the safety of your enterprise data and network.
The consequences of a data breach are not only monetary but can also affect the trust and reputation of your company. This, therefore, can ruin the future of your company and inhibit your growth potential.
How to improve enterprise data protection
Now that you have learned the importance of improving your data security, you need to know the top tips that will help you improve it.
Many aspects of your business including websites, networks, smart devices, and portals are vulnerable to invasion by hackers. Hence, it is important to have the best enterprise VMware backup solution that will ensure quicker recovery of your data and safety as well. Businesses should be equipped with the best tips to improving their data protection.
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Manage data access
As a business, you need to identify what data every employee may or may not have access to. You should give privileged access to your sensitive data to a limited number of employees and other persons in your company.
This is not a complicated thing to do. All you need to do is take your time to determine the people in your company that have access to sensitive data. Also, identify their access rights. The deal here is to be aware of the details of the employees who have access to certain data and why they have access rights. Most company executives fail on this. They are unaware of the details of individual people who have access to data and their access rights. This presents a huge risk to a data breach.
Therefore, it is necessary for all organizations to limit the amount of data access by employees. Admins of every department should determine what type of data an employee should have access to and why they should. Limiting data access can help your company to manage your data more efficiently and ensure it is protected against loss or theft.
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Identify the most valuable data
As a company, it is important to identify your most valuable data. You need to know where sensitive data is and have systems in place to protect it. For most organizations, if a data breach occurred right now, they would take long to identify their most sensitive data.
Sensitive data makes up 5 to 10 percent of the company’s data. Therefore, if it gets compromised, it could cause huge damage to your company.
Having the right information about your most valuable data helps you to allocate more resources and implement protection mechanisms to protect it. At the same time, you should limit the number of personnel that has access to it.
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Create stronger and different passwords throughout your company
This is an important tip that is widely known, but few people implement it, thus, companies end up having weak passwords that look the same for all departments. Well, every data in your company should be locked away with strong and complicated passwords.
Today, hackers have access to several password hacking tools, which they use to gain access to a company’s data, especially if you have weak passwords. Stronger passwords are hard to crack using the various password hacking tools available on the market.
To create stronger passwords, use a combination of different characters including numbers, alphabets, symbols, and capital letters. Your passwords should be at least 12 characters long. Also, they should be unique for all programs and employees.
Using the same passwords for different data is a huge risk to your company. If a hacker cracks your passwords, he could try the same passwords on all programs in your organization. Therefore, have unique passwords for all departments.
Having many passwords should not be hard to manage since you can use a password manager tool. This makes it easier to manage the numerous passwords. Additionally, your employees should be properly trained on data security and the development of stronger passwords.
It is also recommended to use multi-factor authentication, which is essentially having another requirement to password login. Hackers would have to crack the second step if they manage to crack the first password. This could make it much more difficult for them to gain access to your data.
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Have a data security policy
Another important tip when looking to improve enterprise data protection is developing data security policies. Every business should have a plan in place that could help when data breaches or hacking occur. This could significantly help reduce the time used in resolving the issue and prevent further impacts of a cyber-attack.
The data security should also outline the employees that should have access to data. This will help the company executives to be aware of the details of the employees that have data access rights. The policy should be easy to update in order to accommodate the technological changes, industry regulation changes and changes in the company policies.
The policy should be strictly enforced to ensure better protection of the data and should remain relevant at all times, as well.
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Regularly backup data
One of the most important data security measures to take is having regular data backups. Here, businesses should have the best enterprise backup solution, for an unexpected data breach or attack. Businesses need to stay prepared for the unexpected by adopting automatic or manual data backups on a weekly or daily basis.
Additionally, the backup data should be secure from potential threats through strong updated software. You should have a strong IT department that is constantly learning about the best practices for data protection and looking out for the best solutions to keep your data protected.
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Train your employees
Employees must be properly trained on data security. Remember they are often the handlers of customer data. Thus, if they are not aware of the best practices of handling this sensitive data, they might end up making mistakes unawares that could lead to data loss or data breach.
They need to be educated on the latest ways of protecting information to make sure that it is safe from potential threats. They need to be educated about the current fraud schemes and the best practices, such as not clicking suspicious links or opening attachments in unsolicited email messages.
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Have an up-to-date antivirus
Businesses must have up-to-date antivirus software on all of their PC’s to protect them from virus attacks accidentally or on purpose. There are plenty of antivirus software to choose from, but be sure to choose one that best suits your business needs.
Conclusion
In today’s world, there are numerous cyber security risks that all companies face. Companies need to implement the best data security practices that will ensure their data is safe from potential threats. Companies to choose the best enterprise backup solution that suits their business needs. Regular data backups are important. These top tips to improving enterprise data protection will help you stay on top of your company’s data security.