Data has far surpassed material goods as the means of judging and exercising one’s power. Companies big and small are holding on to troves of it, each with the potential to inform business strategies, cut out the competition, or cause lasting damage to reputations and personal information.
What else can we do but step up to the challenge? This article explores several advanced strategies businesses should develop and implement to keep the ever-growing cyber threat at bay.
Encryption
Encrypting all high-value data should be the first step and the last line of defense in a layered cybersecurity strategy. Encrypted data is unintelligible and therefore useless without the means of deciphering it, which only trusted individuals should have access to. Even if other measures fail, encryption ensures an attacker can’t benefit from the data they steal.
It’s important to keep data encrypted at all times. That means ensuring its safety during transit and rest using either the company’s own server infrastructure or a secure third party.
Access Controls and Audits
Day-to-day operations depend on diverse data ranging from current project files for various departments through payroll information to even more delicate information like medical records. Segmenting different types of data off and establishing an access hierarchy will limit the scope of malicious insider attacks.
Enact a zero-trust policy to let users access parts of the network only according to their clearance and area of expertise. Simultaneously, regular audits let you track user activity and establish whenever someone tries to access or modify documents.
Upgraded Traditional Protection Means
Modern cybersecurity best practices are starkly different from the norm a decade or even five years ago. For example, there’s a greater focus on a holistic approach to security that encompasses not only a company and its assets but also the vendors and cloud services it depends on. This doesn’t make tried and true practices irrelevant, though.
For example, maintaining automatic updates for the OS, antimalware, and programs on all endpoints reduces the chances of breaches and exploits. If anything, AI-backed antivirus and antimalware are instrumental in keeping up with and devising answers to emerging threats as they take shape.
Proxies are another long-standing but relevant part of the digital asset protection puzzle. They separate company networks from the internet at large, acting as a filter and gateway. Proxies make sure employees spend their work time productively by blocking time-wasting websites. They can also prohibit access to known malicious sites, protecting employees and company data from malicious attacks.
Data Collection and Privacy Policies
You don’t have to protect what you don’t possess, so trimming down and focusing your data collection efforts is a straightforward and cost-effective way of reducing risk. Cover the data you do need with a comprehensive policy. It should outline what type of data you collect and how, as well as the steps and methods in use to protect it.
Such transparency is beneficial in several ways. It reassures the public, clients, and partners of your integrity and professionalism. Additionally, such a policy likely partially fulfills your obligation to stay compliant with established and emerging data protection laws.
Secure Remote Access
Another departure from traditional security methods concerns the scope of a company’s operations. The main office used to also be the only hub of network activity, allowing IT departments to concentrate their security efforts in one place. Working from home – as well as with employees living in different cities or even time zones – has made this way of doing things impractical.
Business VPNs are an equally secure solution to contemporary scattered security challenges. They use sophisticated encryption to secure the communication between company HQ and any endpoints, regardless of location. While popular for computers and mobile phones, VPNs for iPads and other electronic devices are also available. As long as a VPN is active, no one can trace or intercept a data transfer. This ensures highly sensitive and confidential information remains accessible only to trusted parties.
Threat Detection and Response
Strong preventative measures are the prerequisite for any sound cybersecurity strategy. Still, one has to assume the occasional attacker will find a way around them. Once inside the system, they can wreak havoc and do anything from disrupting operations to causing data breaches whose costs cripple most enterprises.
Threat detection and response (TDR) is a coordinated effort of personnel and tech to identify and thwart attacks as soon as possible.
The identification portion involves network monitoring and pattern recognition to spot anomalous activities. AI is becoming particularly adept at detecting changes in user behavior and honing in on suspicious activity.
You should have an incident response plan to handle any cyber attack’s potential consequences. Specifically, there needs to be a designated response team with clear responsibilities for each member. If they lack any specific skills, there’s always a possibility of enrolling them in educational classes – like data analytics courses. Apart from being aware of their duties and keeping their skills sharp, team members should also judge who else to involve and when depending on the scope and severity of the situation.
Conclusion
In the struggle to safeguard digital assets, cybercriminals’ increased fervor and complexity of their attacks are the only constant. Familiarizing yourself and deploying the most sophisticated tools at your disposal is the only way of keeping the playing field level.