Your Guide to IT Security Best Practices
In today’s age of decentralized workforces, cloud computing, and web applications, cybersecurity is paramount.
This is made even more critical when you consider the facts—more than half of all small businesses fail to recover from a cybersecurity incident.
This means that, as always, the best cure is prevention. That’s where IT security comes in. Building a culture of resilience founded on IT security best practices for your business will go a long way towards ensuring that your business can stand up to the threats that may come.
At Pacific Vector, we believe that understanding today’s risks—as well as the ways businesses can mitigate their exposure to them—is critical for building a more resilient enterprise. That’s why, in today’s article, we’re going to explore some of the most important things that you need to keep in mind when planning its IT security updates.
Grab your pad and pencil, and let’s get started.
Password Managers Are Your Best Friend
When people think of cybersecurity risks, one of the first things that come to mind is the idea of being “hacked.” This often stems from a malicious actor entering your network either by stealing the passwords of your employees or brute-force hacking them.
A brute-force attack is one where the hacker in question attempts to guess passwords—either by attempting to enter commonly used passwords or using trial and error—in order to gain access to a system or network. While not a sophisticated attack, brute force hacking can be incredibly effective due to the fact that many employees fail to secure their accounts with strong passwords.
One of the best ways around this is through the enterprise-wide use of a password manager.
A password manager is a tool that generates passwords for your users and stores them in a central, highly secure application. This type of security software works because the passwords generated are lengthy strings of characters—including numbers, upper- and lower-case letters, and special symbols—that are far too long and complex for a hacker to successfully brute force their way through.
The password managers themselves feature sophisticated security protocols such as encryption to reduce exposure to breaching, which means that your passwords—as well as the application storing them—will be far more resilient to cybercrime.
Education Is Paramount
Hacking isn’t the only threat that businesses need to concern themselves with. There are far more threats facing your organization and employees, including phishing, malware, ransomware, SQL injections, and more.
Most often, these attacks are directly targeted at individual employees and, at a glance, can seem innocuous. Whether it’s your employees unknowingly clicking on a suspicious link or downloading a file that they thought came from a trusted source, the effects can be catastrophic.
The best way to prevent these types of attacks is to stop them from getting through to your employees in the first place. Educating your employees on the various types of attacks that may present themselves is one of the best ways to build a more secure, aware workforce.
Video training on the different types of attacks, suspicious signs to look for or things to keep in mind before clicking on a link embedded in an email promotes stronger information retention and will also engage employees. We’ve found great success in this type of training, and hopefully you will, too!
Treat IT Security As An Evolving Field
When it comes to IT, your business can’t afford to “set it and forget it.”
New attacks are surfacing yearly, and it’s important for your business to keep up to date on developments in order to ensure that its actions are still aligned with industry norms and standards.
While you will be required to maintain an evolving database of knowledge, you can minimize the work required to stay on the cutting edge by implementing best-practice security standards right from the get-go. That way, you can simply add topics to your security videos or layers of protection to your password applications to match evolving requirements.
The Bottom Line On IT Security
We know better than anyone the importance of maintaining strong IT security standards, and we’ve gone to great lengths to secure our clients against—and help them prepare for—the industry’s most pervasive threats. Today, you’ve hopefully learned just a few of the actions you can take to secure your operations from harm.
If you still have questions, or you simply need a hand getting started with any of our suggestions, you can always contact our team for assistance.
