One sure way to lose the hard-earned faith of your customers is to be lax with their data. Not a week goes by in the news without yet another tale of sophisticated hack attacks, data thefts or simply data lost through negligence or a laptop left on a train. The perilous outcomes are as catastrophic as they are abundant; everything from financial losses to stolen identities wreaks havoc for businesses and their customers alike.
One of the most crucial aspects of customer retention as we head through 2020 and beyond is ensuring that customers can rely on their service providers to take good care of their data.
With this in mind, this article takes a look at the three top ways you can improve the efficacy of your IT and digital infrastructure security.
Keeping everything updated, all the time
The best way to deal with any tricky eventuality is to prevent it from occurring in the first place; preventative maintenance. It’s far more cost-effective to protect than it is to heal. The most important aspect of your network security is ensuring that you have battened down all the hatches to make sure potential hackers and cyber-criminals don’t have access to any gaping loopholes in your software applications.
Almost all software that you use, both internally and shared across the connected, digital devices in your organisation are potential entry points for hackers, viruses and malware. While most software is generally written with security in mind from the outset, they are regularly updated as loopholes in systems become apparent and exploited.
One of the easiest and most important security tasks to perform is to ensure that you have set all your software, hardware, firewalls and antivirus installations to automatically update the latest security patches.
Back-up important data regularly
Losing data either to a hacker, a cybercriminal’s latest malware creation, employee negligence or even hardware lost in a fire can result in potentially business ending financial damage. The most effective way to mitigate against such an outcome is to ensure that all of your business-critical data is safely backed up.
Your data is constantly moving and the fluid nature of digital business means you should ensure that your backups are both regular and automated. Precaution dictates that you plan ahead for all eventualities by keeping your backups, whether they be in the cloud or on a physical hard disc, sensibly away from your internal network.
It’s good practice to make a few of these backups (just in case). If in doubt about the best way to go about backing up and protecting your data, engage with a team of cyber security and network specialists who can advise you on how to create a network security plan for your business.
Keep your team security aware
Finally, with the core elements of your network security plan in place, make sure that you leverage the assistance of your most valuable asset: your team. Make sure everybody is trained in network security best practices, aware of your company network security policies and always vigilant against any security breaches by being responsible for any connected devices they might use on a daily basis.