Information security is a top priority in today’s world, and companies now have their employees undergo special training in order to stay up-to-date with the latest standards and techniques. The risks of getting hacked are greater than ever before, and the stakes are extremely high, making information system security crucial for your company’s survival.
Why Is Information Security Important In This Day and Age?
Ensuring your company’s privacy and security pays off in many ways. For starters, you prevent major financial losses and conserve your reputation. Having properly protected systems reduces the chance of your organization having to deal with negative media attention.
If your system is forced to shut down, the time and energy to get everything up and working again decreases productivity, drains resources, and incurs heavy costs for repairs.
Examining Your Information Security Practices: Tips and Tricks
Here are five key measurements indicating how secure your data is, which will allow you to maintain your information system security at all times.
Measurement #1: Password Protection
Create complex passwords that would be impossible to guess even by someone who knows you, and for each employee. The best password policies require employees to use numbers, symbols, capital letters, and special characters in their passwords.
Only the IT department should know what passwords employees are using. This may seem obvious, but uninformed employees have been known to share their passwords with each other. So make sure they know this is strictly against company policy.
Measurement #2: Security Software
Another way to measure the security of one’s information is by looking for malicious software on company computers. It is a common misconception that having antivirus software is enough to keep your information safe. The truth of the matter is that there are numerous viruses and types of malware out there, which antivirus programs can’t pick up on. This leaves many organizations susceptible to malicious attacks. To overcome this problem, companies also employ other methods, such as spam filters, firewalls, data encryption, and email gateways, which, together, provide much more protection.
Measurement #3: Privileged Access Management (PAM)
Privileged Access Management (PAM) is an information system security mechanism safeguarding special access and controls delegated to a small group of trusted individuals. Like all privacy and security solutions, PAM is highly selective in its choice of people, processes, and technology, and it exerts better control over the few individuals selected with privileged access and permissions.
It may seem obvious but it is actually quite common for an organization to mistakenly allow too many people to administer special privileges, making it harder to control who has access to what, leaving the company’s data more vulnerable to external attacks from malicious software.
It is therefore imperative that an organization limits its employees’ access to certain information while maintaining total control over the few users with special permissions.
Measurement #4: Penetration Testing
Also known as a pen test, this measures one’s information system security, by directly trying to penetrate it with a special test. The test essentially gauges how strong an organization’s protections are by analyzing how they hold up against a malicious attack. Any vulnerabilities identified in the test allow an organization to see what issues they need to resolve, and they also inspire a sense of urgency for action to be taken before it’s too late. It is common practice to run penetration tests at least twice a year.
Measurement #5: Backup And Disaster Recovery Testing
Backup testing gives an organization insight into how vulnerable they are to losing vital data in the event of a disaster, such as hardware failure, a system breakdown, network disruption, or a cyberattack.
It goes without saying that backups should be carried out through automated systems and performed on a regular basis, but you also need to know that everything backed up can be recovered, only then can you evaluate the extent of their protection.
Your business needs to be sure that all backed-up files, folders, databases, and volumes have been properly secured on a storage volume, and that they can be seamlessly restored should disaster strike and potentially damage the whole IT system. At the same time, because retrieving the entirety of your data is an exhaustive process, you also want to run some smaller tests to recover specific files that might have been deleted or corrupted.
Checking that off-site data stored in the cloud or through SaaS systems can also be recovered in the worst-case scenario, of say, your backup storage volumes have suffered irreparable damages.
Overall, a business, company, or organization is as good as its data, which means that its survival depends on ensuring the best protection at all times and that no matter what happens, its system can be recovered. Put into such simple terms, it’s easy to see that information security is an integral part of any company’s business operation.
Get your organization up to speed with these five effective ways to measure whether or not your data protection meets industry standards. Only then can you ensure the privacy and security of your data against any kind of threat, both intentional and accidental.
Sunvera Software develops next-level software applications from start-to-finish. We are a premier software and mobile app development agency specializing in healthcare mobile app development, custom mobile app development, telehealth software, sales dashboards, custom mobile app development services, retail software development, supply-chain software, ecommerce, shopify, web design, iBeacon apps, security solutions and unified access software.
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Schedule a free 30-minute call with us to discuss your business, or you can give us a call at (949) 284-6300.
