The New Year is a great time to make big decisions regarding your cybersecurity. As you set budgets for the year and determine how to divide up resources, be sure to give generously to your tech defence fund. It could just save your business.
As GDPR puts the onus on companies to keep client GPDR Data Safety, the consequences of a breach in 2018 will be far more serious than a grovelling apology. If your security system isn’t up to scratch and information goes missing, you’ll be hit with a fine, too.
With this in mind, here are a few New Year’s tech resolutions to take advantage of, enabling you to start 2018 as you mean to go on.
Advanced password practice
Whilst big firms remain the obvious targets for cybercriminals and hackers, small and medium-sized businesses continue to suffer breaches because their security systems are so easy to crack.
More often than not, this can be avoided.
According to the Verizon 2016 Data Breach Investigations Report, a little less than two-thirds of all data breaches were due to poor password control. Rotating details and changing passwords might feel like a pain, but it’s one of the easiest, most resourceful and most effective ways to bolster your cybersecurity.
Set a strong password policy in your organisation this year. Ensure staff are made to frequently change passwords (every 60 days), never write them down, and use strong combinations (upper & lower case letters, numbers, symbols). Minimise the number of people who can access the overall system and ensure this password is rotated regularly too.
Education courses
You can never learn too much about cybersecurity. This is officially one of the fastest-growing industries in the world, and every day we seem to learn something new about keeping networks safe.
Subsequently, enrolling staff (and yourself) on regular cybersecurity education courses is essential. Hearing experts discuss dangers and reflect on cybersecurity trends can awaken staff to the harsh realities of poor practices; showing them the role they have to play.
By staying up to date with all the latest happenings in the cybersecurity world, you’ll acquire the necessary advice to keep your company in the strongest possible position.
Healthy backup and reset habits
Your machines ought to be prompting staff to reset and backup on a daily basis, and they should be obliging. It’s tempting to bat away the update reminders and delay system restarts for as long as possible, but these actions are essential to the well-being of your network.
Without the necessary updates, the system won’t be best equipped to defend itself against the latest attacks.
Backing up and encrypting data is equally important. This way, if you do suffer a breach, you have spare copies of your information, and whatever is stolen will be unreadable to the hacker.
Modern businesses are under greater pressure than ever to keep their network fastened tight – and sticking to these resolutions can go a long way to improving your security. Focus specialise in helping companies to get their systems in shape for 2018.
Get in touch to find out more about what we can do for your brand.
