Modern day businesses practically run on data and a multitude of different computer systems. In offices employees often have their own desktop computers or laptops that serve as their work device or device that may have important information on it.
This information could be personal or it could be extremely confidential and this is where data security becomes immensely important. When working in a large company with a ton of ins and outs and different people or systems that could steal your information, it’s easy to lose track of who sees your stuff.
This is why it’s a great idea to make sure you’re keeping your data safe and that you have a few tricks up your sleeve for those trying to take that data that may be precious to you or the security of your job; because you never know who may be looking for your data or who is trying to steal your important information.
Get a VPN
Many companies likely use VPNs or their version of one in any of their servers, but if they don’t then it would be a great idea to invest in one and make sure it is always running on your work device and your remote device.
When working remotely you’ll always need an internet connection if you have to access services from your business. This means you’ll connect to public wifi at a coffee shop and openly broadcast your precious data to those tech-savvy people also using the free public wifi.
A VPN will reroute your information through a private network that gives you a sort of alias that will hide your information from everyone else. Without a VPN your laptop or device essentially looks like it has a nametag on it telling any malicious user that your device is vulnerable.
A VPN completely gets rid of this worry as it puts a fake nametag on telling the other users that your information is secured by more than they thought. At this point on the internet, a VPN is as important as antivirus software.
Cybersecurity Assessments
For bigger businesses, it is often difficult to target what exactly may be a flaw or a vulnerability in your systems or services. One important way to prepare, and fix these vulnerabilities is to conduct routine cybersecurity assessments.
A cybersecurity assessment is a form of testing that allows experts to thoroughly search your systems for exploitations and target which ones are the most important and which need to be prioritized.
These assessments are very important for any business or anyone running any sort of server or anything online. The amount of vulnerabilities at one time on a server is not usually known and it often does not become a problem until all of your important information is already gone.
Be sure to make these assessments routine as the internet is always changing, and in a very unpredictable way, so always having the upper hand on those trying to steal your stuff is your best bet for keeping it safe.
Encrypt Your Data
Encryption has been around for a very long time in the form of ciphers, unknown languages, secret messages, and things of this sort. The internet is no stranger to encryption since when the internet first arose, it was incredibly easy to intercept a message or a packet sent across a state or a country and read whatever was inside.
With this being said, the internet users of the past few centuries realized they could encrypt the data using ciphers known in the past and new ones that fit the modern era. These encryptions usually involve number systems and keys that are only owned by the user.
While this option may require a bit more effort, if you are working on a server or something run inside your business, then encryption is the best way to protect anything you have on that server as it will be locked to anyone who tries to steal it.
And with modern encryptions, there aren’t many ways to crack open these ciphers unless someone had a quantum computer, and this would still take a gargantuan amount of time. In other words, your data would be quite safe.
Make Strong Passwords
Perhaps one of the simplest methods to protecting your data is to have a great deal of strong passwords. Every account you have likely uses the same old username and password or email and password system. While it’s a good system it has many flaws if the user doesn’t make a great password.
For most people, it is almost certain that they use the same, or similar password for every account they have which is a horrible idea. If one person gets a password to your account, all of your information is gone on every account that password is linked to.
The ideal solution is to have a different, randomly generated password for every account you have, this way not all of your accounts get taken at once, and it makes your accounts much more difficult to get into.
Keep Your Data Safe
Information is very important, a lot can be done with a single page of information depending on what is on that page. Or imagine having the passwords to one hundred Gmail accounts because people are still using “password” as their password.
Plenty of damage can be done very quickly if cybersecurity is not important to you. One day you can be working normally on your regular business account, and the next day you could have lost your business account and now five other service accounts have been compromised because you used the same password for all of them.
If you don’t have on already, get a VPN and put it on all of your devices, ensure that you’re having experts check your security and making sure they fix all of the vulnerabilities your systems may have, and always have strong random passwords for each of your accounts or you may be in a world of trouble.
