Tip of the Week: Here Are a Few of Our Favorite Security Practices

There will never be a time that we are not committed to improving the security of businesses. To continue striving for this goal, we’re dedicating this week’s tip to describing some solutions that can assist in locking a business and its data down.

Access Control
One of the best ways to ensure the security of your office (and its contents) is to prevent threats from getting in at all. There are many overlapping ways to do so, ranging from a fence around the office to a magnetic door lock that requires both a password and biometric authentication. Controlling access to your resources means that you are more able to protect them from threats.

If something were to happen to these resources despite an access control solution being in place, they will keep a record of who it was that entered, and when, allowing you to narrow your investigation from the start.

Data Security Policies and Practices
Your data is valuable, whether it contains your clients’ financial details, your own business’ affairs, or internal documents of sufficient sensitivity. As such, you need to be sure that you are prepared to protect this data before something happens to it.

This will require a few different activities on your part, as there is a lot of ground to cover.

With the number of cyberattacks and data breaches today, many of which rely on businesses being unprepared to deflect them, you cannot afford for your business to be exposed. Furthermore, your team needs to be made aware of the many ways that an attack can sneak through, and how to properly stop them. As more and more attacks are leveraging human error to their advantage, educating your staff is paramount to your success.

It is also crucial to enforce the policies you put in place, embracing your leadership role. By holding your staff accountable to the rules they have agreed to abide by, you can potentially shore up a few vulnerabilities up front, minimizing the rest through implementing the various best practices we recommend. Reach out to us to learn more about these practices, and how we can help you to enact them.

Review Your Insurance
If you haven’t reviewed your commercial property insurance in a while, take the time to do so. Based on your business’ location and its environment, your data security (and your building itself) could be under threat from a variety of sources. From vandalism to theft to flooding to fire, there are plenty of circumstances that could put your business’ future into question. You may want to consider boosting your coverage against certain events based on your risk of them, but you need to make sure you are insured against the risks that your business would be subject to.

Audit and Identify Risks
One of the most effective ways to improve your existing security is to establish what about it leaves you vulnerable. If you can identify the inherent risks to your business and its data, you are better able to prioritize your upgrades and optimization strategies.

A complete audit of your technology is a great way to do so, as it will shine the light on the facets of your IT that need these upgrades more than others may. You should also audit your existing security policies to both ensure that your employees are following your processes, and if these policies are effective in improving your security. If either answer turns out to be “no”, you have an opportunity to resolve it - immediately improving your security with (ideally) minimal invested time and cost.

Lean on an Outsourced Provider
A provider of professional IT services, like Washington Works, can make any of these activities much simpler to complete without sacrificing your internal productivity. Give us a call at 301-571-5040 to learn more about how we can help.

Tell us, what other IT security tips have you heard? Leave them in the comments!