Data breaches have become a big issue across all industries because of their high costs and the likelihood of legal processes if a company is sued. In 2022, the US witnessed massive data breaches costing about $9.44 million. While almost all companies are vulnerable to data breaches, you can take the five steps below to eliminate or minimize these breaches.
1. Establish Clear Data Procedures And Policies
In most cases, company employees are involved in data breaches. Some cases arise from a lack of knowledge, misunderstandings, negligence, or malice. Disgruntled employees can leak confidential information to outsiders in exchange for money. That explains why you must lay down clear data procedures and policies.
Your contractor and employees must sign corporate confidentiality agreements and security policies. The policies must be made clear to the employees right at the time of employment.
2. Safe Employment And Terminations Procedures
Hiring and terminating employees pose significant risks to many companies’ data security. When onboarding new employees, you will permit them to access your company resources, including clients’ data. Some of these employees may take sensitive data home and put your company at risk. Safe employment and termination process are vital in preventing data breaches.
3. Monitoring Activity And Access
Trusted employees should monitor new employees and guide them on using company resources. The main challenge is that company data stores and IT infrastructures have grown, so monitoring them could be impractical.
That explains why you need to automate your company procedure so you can track the activities across your entire database, servers, and network infrastructure.
4. Using Data Breach Prevention Tools
Employees can breach your corporate data in many ways. For example, they can upload your data to unsafe cloud-based apps. They can also use ransomware or malware-infected computers to process your corporate data.
All these will expose your data to cybercriminals. This calls for using reliable breach-prevention tools to protect your data. You can protect data using object lock to ensure your data cannot be deleted or modified for a specified period and to keep ransomware at bay.
Data breach prevention tools will control how your sensitive data is used and ensure the data is stored securely. The tools will monitor how your employees access data and block unauthorized access.
5. Implementing Endpoint Data Security
You must implement endpoint data security procedures if some of your employees work remotely. Note that employees working online will connect to your corporate IT network over the Internet.
The devices your employees use remotely may also store your sensitive data. For this reason, your IT staff must control what data can be accessed remotely and which cannot. They should also devise methods to monitor employees’ actions when accessing the company’s online platform.
Data security measures are complex and technical. More so because cybercriminals are devising new techniques to access company data. If your in-house IT team cannot offer adequate security to your corporate data, it would help to hire data security experts. Also, consider migrating to the cloud. It is more secure than using physical hardware.
