How to Keep Data Secure

protect business data

Data is among your most important assets, providing insight for making strategic decisions and building stronger partnerships with customers and partners. However, it could also be one of your biggest risks if you don’t make the right steps to protect it.

Companies could lose millions dollars as a result of data breaches. They can also harm the brand’s image, undermine confidence, and even lead to sanctions from regulatory agencies. While data breaches are inevitable, there are some things you can do to minimize the risk and protect your data from cybercriminals.

1. Authenticate and authorize users.

Data security requires authentication and authorization process that is strong to ensure that only authorized users have access to your data. This can be accomplished by requiring that two or more forms are used to access your data, such as things that the user is aware of (passwords and tokens) or something has (electronics and other hardware), or something they actually are (biometrics like fingerprints and face recognition).

2. Encrypt everything

Classified data is the most sensitive information and its disclosure without authorization can have the most severe negative consequences for your company and/or the individuals affected. To protect classified data, it should be secured at all times and protected with a decryption keys that is only accessible to authorized personnel. Your team should regularly review classifications and establish a procedure to manage encryption keys in order to ensure that they are not compromised.

3. Reduce non-essential data access.

Most employees don’t need full access to company information. This can reduce the risk to be hacked by cutting down the number of entry points that could be a source of danger. It is a good idea to restrict access to minimum data required for the job and also to utilize password-based user IDs to limit access to information even if usernames and passwords are stolen.