With the rising levels of cybercrime, data protection is a big concern for every business. There were over 36 billion records exposed in 2020 alone. Unless you take data protection seriously, your company will join those numbers.
You need the right data protection strategies to ensure the safety of your business data. The five protection strategies below will ensure none of your data gets compromised.
1. Encrypt Data at Rest
Seeing gibberish isn’t helpful when you need to make use of your data. However, if you leave your data unencrypted when you aren’t using it, anyone with access to your data server can read everything you have.
That’s why encrypting data on your servers is essential. Doing this means that anyone who gains unauthorized access to your data servers can’t use what they find. You can unencrypt your data when you need it and leave it protected the rest of the time.
2. Use Access Management
One of the most straightforward ways to create a data management strategy is to give everyone access to all your data. While doing this is easy, it also creates the most risk.
Use access management to ensure people can only see the files they need to do their jobs. Working this way helps you isolate data to ensure you limit damage in cases where your employees are compromised by hackers or malware.
3. Require Strong Passwords
Once you set up your access management, you’ll need to ensure that your employees have strong enough passwords. It’s common for people to use easy-to-remember passwords across all their accounts. If you want your data to stay safe, you can’t allow this to happen.
Make sure your employees have complex passwords that include at least eight characters one of the following characters:
- Uppercase letter
- Lowercase letter
- Number
- Special character
Requiring this will help your employees create complex passwords that are challenging to guess.
4. Create a Data Usage Policy
Even if you have a lot of safeguards in place to protect your data, none of that is helpful if your employees do the wrong things with your data. Believe it or not, this will be your biggest challenge when you develop your data protection strategy.
Having a data usage policy will help address this issue. Create a set of procedures for your team to use when they access company data. Standardizing this will keep your employees on the same page and help make sure they don’t misuse any data.
5. Backup Critical Information
While your computer hardware will work great most of the time, its reliability will start going down as it ages. When this happens, it increases the chances of hardware failure and data loss.
You can backup your information to help in these cases. When you store copies of your data off-site, you can quickly recover it when it goes missing. You can look for managed IT services near me to find a company to help you create a reliable backup strategy.
There Are More Data Protection Strategies Out There
With how reliant businesses are on data these days, you can’t afford to protect your data. The data protection strategies are only the start of the process. Keep optimizing your data storage and security methods to ensure nothing bad happens to your information.
If you want to learn more tips and tricks to help you make the most of the newest tech tools, check out the latest blog posts for more ideas.
